"Othello's occupation" be not yet "gone," yet from that moment he can no longer "go to 't" with that entire lightheartedness, that "in unreproved pleasures free" feeling, which hitherto he has done. A little leaven of uneasiness will mingle with what was once an unalloyed delight, it will grow and grow, until, at last, with some men, first the pleasure in the thing, and then the thing itself will cease. With others the instinct will remain too strong, but, even with them, something will have been done, since no thought, if only we could trace it out, is ever thought in vain. It occurred, no doubt, one day, to some Roman sitting in the colosseum, that what he was witnessing was not quite a right state of things. He continued all his life to witness it; but if the whole progress of that age could be laid before us, that thought would have its place.
I have said that both reason and humanity rebel at the unnecessary killing of wild animals. For the humanity, that is self-evident—to torture is not humane: and for the reason, when one comes to think of it a little, how absolutely silly it is! It is destruction, the child's pleasure, the unmaking of what one could not possibly make, smashing, breaking up, dashing to pieces, vandalism applied to the living works of nature, leading to their eternal perishing, with a hideous void in their stead. Something was alive, interesting, beautiful: you make it dead, uninteresting, ugly—at least, by comparison. And yet the hunting instinct—the heritage from countless
