Rialto that his fancy builds up the Venice he desires his audience to see. We are made to feel the crowd upon the bridge and at the foot of its long flight of stairs; we picture Antonio sauntering with his friends, waiting for news of his galleys, and Shylock creeping by, eyeing and eyed askance, and now and then tormented by the boys as they recognise the yellow sign of his Jewish blood upon his breast or his cap. In the characters of the play, too, the Venetian flavour is for the most part successfully maintained. Portia is most thoroughly Venetian; so also are Shylock and Antonio; indeed the Jew is not more distinctly Jewish than Venetian in many respects; the average Venetian merchant-not Antonio, of course, for he is meant to be an exception-and his Jewish rivals were, we suspect, at no time very different in their methods of conducting business. There is only one point where the Venetian quality of the play is violated—that is in the portrayal of the country clowns, Gobbo the Elder and Launcelot, his son. They are both peasant-bred, but their note, the tone of their conversation and their humour, is English, or at least not Italian. It is in Portia, Shylock and Rialto that we catch the purest aroma of Venice which the play exhales. "If we ask how far do stray touches and phrases in this drama show on the part of the playwright a knowledge of Venetian habits, laws and customs, we shall find several points worthy of notice. Whether the poet drew his character of Antonio from the merchantprince Fugger, as has been suggested; whether he was aware of the great German exchange-house, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, which existed in Venice, or not, he is certainly fully alive to the fact that commercial relations between Venice and Germany were of the closest description. With no German city was trade more active than with Frankfort; and Shakespeare shows his information on this point when he makes 'The Duke cannot deny the course of law; Will much impeach the justice of his state; Consisteth of all nations.' "That states the truth about Venetian commercial policy; the great freedom and security she always allowed to strangers, which accounted for so much of her prosperity, and for the rooted affection which her dependencies bore towards her-an affection which manifested itself after the wars of the League of Cambray, when the liberated cities voluntarily returned to their allegiance towards St. Mark." And again : "The whole of the first act of Othello is full of the spirit of Venice, which the poet has known how to breathe into his words. The dark night, the narrow streets, Brabantio's house with close-barred doors and shutters, the low voices of Iago and Rodrigo, the sudden uproar springing up out of the quiet night, the torches and lacqueys, the 'knave of common hire,' the gondolier, the doge and senators in council, their indignation at their brother patrician's wrongs, Othello's calm and noble statement of his wooing, how he sped by tales of moving accidents, and histories so strange as to tempt us almost to believe that Shakespeare had studied Marco Polo's Voyages;' Brabantio's bitter, resentful, unforgiving warning : 'Look to her, Moor, if thou have eyes to see: She has deceived her father, and may thee,' all this is admirably conceived to picture forth one full night in Venice. "As in the comedy Portia is the type of the brilliant, playful, sprightly, Venetian lady, so in the tragedy Desdemona personifies the gentle, loving, submissive, patient type, so dear to the Italians. And again : "We would draw attention to a few other points and touches which help to throw light on the extent of Shakespeare's knowledge of Venice, Venetian territory, and Venetian people. When Brabantio unwilling and with an ill grace resigns his daughter to the Moor, he says to Desdemona :: 'For your sake, jewel, I am glad at soul I have no other child; "It is possible that in this passage Shakespeare is thinking of those high pattens which were then in favour with Venetian ladies. They were worn so enormously high that a lady required the attendance of two lacqueys, upon whose shoulders she leaned for support when she went abroad. The story in St. Disdier's La Ville et la Republique de Venise,' already quoted, appears to throw light on Shakespeare's intention in this passage. The French traveller relates that the Ambassador of France, in conversation with the Doge, remarked once that shoes would be much more convenient; whereupon one of the ducal councillors broke in severely, 'Yes, far, far too convenient.' Again, Brabantio, when he learns his daughter's flight, calls for some special officers of night;' would Shakespeare have thought of such a strange and picturesque description of the night patrol had he not known that in Venice those officers bore the title of Signori di Notte, lords of the night? The poet is aware that Padua possessed a university, and was a famous nursery of arts; this is not surprising when we recollect how many Englishmen went to study in that city. But more than this, he knew that Padua belonged to Venice, and that Mantua did not. Tranio tells the pedant : ''Tis death for any one in Mantua To come to Padua. Know you not the cause? "It was surely not a little for a London play-actor to know so much of the complicated political geography of Italy. In the passage just quoted the term 'pedant' declares that Tranio shall ever be the patron, that is padrone, master of his life and liberty. We do not know if Sound as a fish,' an expression which passes from Launce to Speed in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, was an English proverb in use at Shakespeare's date, but 'sano come un pesce' certainly was, and is a good Italian proverb to this day." And again : "Shakespeare is aware, too, of the right use of Italian Gentile names. Lucentio, in The Taming of the Shrew, describes his father as 'Vincentio come of the Bentivolii,' that is, Vincenzo de' Bentivoglii." What would be the verdict of an intelligent jury after listening to the testimony of Mr. Brown? Must it not be this :-We find that the plays Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Taming of the Shrew, contain a knowledge of minute facts in detail which no imagination can fairly be expected to compass, and which can only have been obtained and reproduced by a man who had travelled through Italy. Mr. Brown starts by referring to a man (Shakespere, of Stratford) who probably was never out Ergo, he could not have been the author of England. of the plays. THE GRAVE'S TIRING-ROOM BY MR. J. E. ROE. N our paper in the April issue of BACONIANA under the foregoing title, we purposely avoided IN all conclusions touching the poem subscribed I. M. there under review further than they could be made to appear by the quotations themselves, which included Son. 68. That Sonnet involved the ultimate purpose of our paper, viz., the dead fleece of Bacon's first, and the beginning, subsequent to his fall, of a second literary period, and on second head. The claim that all of the poems introductory to the plays were products of Bacon's pen, notwithstanding the appending of other names to them, we had distinctly laid long before they were claimed to contain cyphers. But as the dead fleece and second life of the Sonnet are also touched in the poem I. M., we thought, if there was any change in Bacon's cypher methods in living that second life, some touch of it, indicated by cypher, might be looked for in this particular poem, standing, as it does, introductory to the plays, and framed by Bacon's own pen, touching not only the removal by death of his own cover, weed, nom-deplume, or mask-Shake-speare-but also touching the printed worth of that dead fleece, and which poem is in these words : "To the memory of Mr. W. Shakespeare. We wonder'd, Shakespeare, that thou went'st so soon |