orter
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