Othello in the nursery, and so carried away by the passionate impulse of these lines,—
"In Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him, thus,"—
that he struck himself fiercely on the breast with an iron chisel, and fainted under the blow. We can hardly believe that Shakespeare is beyond the mental grasp of childhood, when Scott, at seven, crept out of bed on winter nights to read "King Henry IV.," and Rossetti, at nine, was overwhelmed by the agony of Othello's remorse.
On the other hand, there are writers, and very brilliant writers, too, whose early lives appear to have been undisturbed by such keenly imaginative pastimes, and for whom there are no well-loved and familiar figures illumined forever in "that bright, clear, undying light that borders the edge of the oblivion of infancy." Count Tolstoi confesses himself to have been half hurt, half puzzled, by his fellow-students at the University of Moscow, who seemed to him so coarse and inele-
