she took the matter into her own hands, and went, alone, to Lushington, and told him-what? Nobody knows. Nobody but Lushington ever knew. Lushington died without telling it. She died without telling it. And we can get no further. Whatever it was, it made so great an impression on Lushington that, he said, he would have no hand in any attempt at smoothing over things. So, having challenged his adversary to come into court, and challenged her in vain, Byron signed the deed of separation, and departed on his pilgrimage. And with him went Manfred and Harold iii.-iv., and Sardanapalus, and Cain, and the Vision, and Don Juan-the one epic of modern life which has as yet got written. And he died at Missolonghi and was mourned by Walter Scott. And in the end it was found that he had largely recreated European art.

As for his lady, she who in 1816 seemed so keen (yet was not nearly so keen as she seemed) to prove him mad, it is enough to say that she died in 1861, having lived to take on Robertson of Brighton as her spiritual director, to develop unseemly ideas about Augusta, and to confide those ideas to an American sensation-monger. A charitable explanation is that Pippin was a very plausible and moving yet a most mischievous and inexorable monomaniac: one who knew not when she did ill and lied, and when she did not. In other words, she was—as I see her a piece of self-righteousness so complete, so assertive, so full of will and purpose and approval, that she had but to do ill to make her ill-doing virtue-but to utter a lie for her utterance

to make her lie a truth. She married Byron, and she so put her talent out to use-that it is not nearly so difficult as it used to be to account for the cold heart and serpent smile' and the unfathomed depths of guile' of a famous passage in Manfred. I am not sure that it was not the best thing that she could have done for Byron, for letters, for the race. But there are times when I can't help wishing that she'd married some one else. Wordsworth, for instance. Wordsworth? It is pretty certain that, if she had, he, the impeccable, would have had plenty of opportunity to learn how awful goodness is'; while, as for his sister . . . O Dorothy, dear Dorothy-the very different sort of martyr you might be!

OTHELLO

I

IN 1622 'N. O.' printed for Thomas Walkly: 'and are to be sold at his Shop, at the sign of the Eagle and Child, in Brittan's Bursse': the Tragedy of Othello the Moore of Venice,' as it had been 'divers times acted at the Globe and at the Black-Friars by his Maiestie's Servants.' This is the first Othello. 'To commend it I will not,' Walkly says; for that which is good I hope every man will commend, without entreaty; and I am the bolder because the Author's name is sufficient to vent his work.' Then, the year after (1623), came the First Folio; and in 1630 Walkly, who seems to have been in pocket by his earlier venture, published a Second Quarto. It is of no particular interest or importance: the text, as we have it, being Walkly plus Heminge and Condell, the First Quarto plus the First Folio. The latter version is longer than Walkly's by some hundred and fifty lines; but the Walkly, printed (Mr. Herford conjectures) 'from an old copy of the play, as curtailed, and otherwise modified, for performance,' is very much richer in 'oaths and expletives' than the Heminge and Condell, and is therefore of respectable authority.

As the first recorded performance of Othello is dated 1604 in the November of which year it was presented before the Court at Whitehall: and as the style, as beseems the subject, is 'simple, sensuous, and passionate' to the nth degree: a style with memories of Hamlet yet with scarce a foretaste of Macbeth it is assumed that 1604 was the birthyear of this unrivalled achievement in intimate, or domestic, drama, and that the text, as we have it, is very much the text that left Shakespeare's hand.

II

THE material is engagingly old and plain, at the same time that it is unalterably and essentially eternal. As stated recently by a critic, a critic, by the way, of the same name as the Moore's' first printer, it is simply the story of what your Modern Frenchman has elected to denote and to discriminate as un crime passionnel. In Cinthio's Hecatommithi, where Shakespeare found the raw suggestion of his mighty and magnificent presentation of jealousy of jealousy, too, in its operation on a mind which, rich in other sorts of experience, is, sexually speaking, next door to virginal: the passional crime is ever so much more persuasively paragraphed than it is in Mr. Walkly's amiable boutade; for in Cinthio the hero is not Othello (he is not so much, I believe, as named) but Iago, his Ensign, in love with Desdemona." To that fair and innocent creature Cinthio's Antient imparts the purpose of his passion; she understands him not; he instantly conceives her enamoured of the party

we know as Michael Cassio. So he goes to work, corrupts the Moor, plots Disdemona's death, and the Lieutenant's; and, in the end, after sandbagging the object of his passion into the other world in her husband's presence, pulling down the ceiling upon her broken body, and giving out that she has been killed by a fallen beam, turns on the Moor, accuses him of murder, gets him tortured and done to death, and having thus justified his Renaissance habit, and purged himself of his crime d'amour, goes gallantly to justice on another count, and accepts the sweet compulsion of the Rope for another crime. It is in this rather blackguard story of a blackguard lecher's disappointment and revenge that our Archimage discovered his 'Othello.' He astonishes always, when you come to look into his treatment of other men's material. His method is ever royal: he lays hands on what he wants, and the fact that he wants it makes it his and none else's. I know not that, anywhere in his work, is there discovered so clear a proof of sovereignty as here. Othello, Iago, Cassio, Emilia, Desdemona-even the Handkerchief-all these figure in the twentyseventh of the Hecatommithi. Yet to compare the Novella and the Play is to live in two worlds at once, and, so living, to be utterly and everlastingly cognisant of the inexpressible difference between creation as Cinthio understood and practised it, and creation as it was apprehended and done by William Shakespeare.