(At this important point of a most interesting paper, our reporter unhappily became unconscious, and remained for some considerable period in a state of deathlike stupor.  On recovering from this total and unaccountable suspension of all his faculties, he found the speaker drawing gradually near the end of his figures, and so far succeeded in shaking off the sense of coma as to be able to resume his notes.)

That the first and fourth scenes of the third act were not by the same hand as the third scene he should have no difficulty in proving to the satisfaction of all capable and fair-minded men.  In the first and fourth scenes the word “virtuous” was used as a dissyllable; in the third it was used as a trisyllable.

   “Is, that she will to virtuous Desdemona.” iii. 1.

   “Where virtue is, these are more virtuous.” iii. 3.

   “That by your virtuous means I may again.” iii. 4.

In the third scene he would also point out the great number of triple endings which had originally led the able editor of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry to attribute the authorship of this scene to Shirley:  Cassio (twice), patience, Cassio (again), discretion, Cassio (again), honesty, Cassio (again), jealousy, jealous (used as a trisyllable in the verse of Shakespeare’s time), company (two consecutive lines with the triple ending), Cassio (again), conscience, petition, ability, importunity, conversation, marriage, dungeon, mandragora, passion, monstrous, conclusion, bounteous.  He could not imagine any man in his senses questioning the weight of this evidence.  Now, let them take the rhymed speeches of the Duke and Brabantio in Act i.  Sc. 3, and compare them with the speech of Othello in Act iv.  Sc. 2,

         Had it pleased heaven
   To try me with affliction.

He appealed to any expert whether this was not in Shakespeare’s easy fourth budding manner, with, too, various other points already touched on.  On the other hand, take the opening of Brabantio’s speech—­

So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile;
We lose it not so long as we can smile.

That, he said, was in Shakespeare’s difficult second flowering manner—­the style of the later part of the earlier stage of Shakespeare’s rhetorical first period but one.  It was no more possible to move the one passage up to the date of the other than to invert the order of the alphabet.  Here, then, putting aside for the moment the part of the play supplied by Shakespeare’s assistants in the last three acts—­miserably weak some of it was—­they were able to disentangle the early love-play from the latter work in which Iago was principally concerned.  There was at least fifteen years’ growth between them, the steps of which could he traced in the poet’s intermediate plays by any one who chose to work carefully enough at them.  Set any of the speeches addressed