"How can you ask the question?" Tomes replied; adding, after a moment's
pause, "he means, more plainly than any other words can tell, that
Cassio's truthful nature and manly bearing, his courtesy, which was the
genuine gold of real kindness brought to its highest polish, and not a
base alloy of selfishness and craft galvanized into a surface-semblance
of such worth, his manifest reverence for and love of what was good and
pure and noble, his charitable, generous, unenvious disposition, his
sweetness of temper, and his gallantry, all of which found expression in
face or action, made a character so lovely and so beautiful that every
daily observer of them both found him, Iago, hateful and hideous by
comparison."

_Grey_. I suspected as much before I had the benefit of your comment;
which, by the way, ran off your tongue as glibly as if you were one of
the folk who profess Shakespeare, and you were threatening the world
with an essay on Othello. But sometimes it has seemed to me as if these
words meant more; Shakespeare's mental vision took in so much. Was the
beauty of Cassio's life only a moral beauty?

_Tomes_. For all we know, it was.

_Grey_. I say, perhaps, or--No,--Cassio has seemed to me not more a
gallant soldier and a generous spirit than a cultivated and accomplished
gentleman; he, indeed, shows higher culture than any other character in
the tragedy, as well as finer natural tastes; and I have thought that
into the scope of this phrase, "daily beauty," Shakespeare took not
only the honorable and lovely traits of moral nature, to which you, and
perhaps the rest of the world with you, seem to limit it, but all the
outward belongings and surroundings of the personage to whom it is
applied. For these, indeed, were a part of his life, of him,--and went