It is common for people to talk of Shakspeare’s plays being so natural; that everybody can understand him.  They are natural indeed, they are grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies out of the reach of most of us.  You shall hear the same persons say that George Barnwell is very natural, and Othello is very natural, that they are both very deep; and to them they are the same kind of thing.  At the one they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commit a trifling peccadillo, the murder of an uncle or so[1] that is all, and so comes to an untimely end, which is so moving; and at the other, because a blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white wife; and the odds are that ninety-nine out of a hundred would willingly behold the same catastrophe happen to both the heroes, and have thought the rope more due to Othello than to Barnwell.  For of the texture of Othello’s mind, the inward construction marvellously laid open with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love, they see no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their pennies apiece to look through the man’s telescope in Leicester-fields, see into the inward plot and topography of the moon.  Some dim thing or other they see; they see an actor personating a passion, of grief, or anger, for instance, and they recognize it as a copy of the usual external effects of such passions; or at least as being true to that symbol of the emotion which passes current at the theatre for it, for it is often no more than that:  but of the grounds of the passion, its correspondence to a great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy object of tragedy,—­that common auditors know anything of this, or can have any such notions dinned into them by the mere strength of an actor’s lungs,—­that apprehensions foreign to them should be thus infused into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand how it can be possible.

[Footnote 1:  If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the Managers, I would entreat and beg of them, in the name of both the Galleries, that this insult upon the morality of the common people of London should cease to be eternally repeated in the holiday weeks.  Why are the ’Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead of an amusement, to be treated over and over again with a nauseous sermon of George Barnwell?  Why at the end of their vistas are we to place the gallows?  Were I an uncle, I should not much like a nephew of mine to have such an example placed before his eyes.  It is really making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it as done upon such slight motives;—­it is attributing too much to such characters as Millwood:—­it is putting things into the heads of good young men, which they would never otherwise have dreamed of.  Uncles that think anything of their lives, should fairly petition the Chamberlain against it.]