You have hit it there, Talboys. Shakspeare, we have seen, in his calmer constructions, shows, in a score of ways, weeks, months; that is therefore the true time, or call it the historical time. Hurried himself, and hurrying you on the torrent of passion, he forgets time, and a false show of time, to the utmost contracted, arises. I do not know whether he did not perceive this false exhibition of time, or perceiving, he did not care. But we all must see a reason, and a cogent one, why he should not let in the markings of protraction upon his dialogues of the Seduced and the Seducer. You can conceive nothing better than that the Poet, in the moment of composition, seizes the views which at that moment offer themselves as effective—unconscious or regardless of incompatibility. He is whole to the present; and as all is feigned, he does not remember how the foregone makes the ongoing impracticable. Have you ever before, Talboys, examined time in a Play of Shakspeare? Much more, have you ever examined the treatment of time on the Stage to which Shakspeare came, upon which he lived, and which he left? TALBOYS. A good deal. NORTH. Not much, I suspect. TALBOYS. Why, not at all—except t’other day along with you—in Macbeth. NORTH. He came to a Stage which certainly had not cultivated the logic of time as a branch of the Dramatic Art. It appears to me that those old people, when they were enwrapt in the transport of their creative power, totally forgot all regard, lost all consciousness of time. Passion does not know the clock or the calendar. Intimations of time, now vague, now positive, will continually occur; but also the Scenes float, like the Cyclades in a Sea of Time, at distances utterly indeterminate—Most near? Most remote? That is a Stage of Power, and not of Rules—Dynamic, not Formal. I say again at last as at first, that the time of Othello, tried by the notions of time in _our Art_, or tried, if you will, by the type of prosaic and literal time, is—INSOLUBLE. TALBOYS. To the first question, therefore, being What is the truth of the matter? the answer stands, I conceive without a shadow of doubt or difficulty, “The time of Othello is—as real time—INSOLUBLE.” NORTH. By heavens, he echoes me! TALBOYS. Or, it is proposed incongruously, impossibly. Then arises the question, How stood the time in the mind of Shakspeare? NORTH.