Nor so very few. Shakspeare took up the sprawling, forlorn infant, dramatic Time. He cradled, rocked, and fed it. The bantling throve, and crawled vigorously about on all-fours. But since then, thou Tallometer, imagine the study that _we_ have made. Count not our Epic Poems—not our Metrical Romances—not our Tragedies. Count our Comedies, and count above all our Novels. I do not say that you can settle Time in these by the almanac. They are the less poetical when you can do so; but I say that we have with wonderful and immense diligence studied the working out of a Story. Time being here an essential constituent, it cannot be but that, in our more exact and critical layings-out of the chain of occurrences, we have arrived at a tutored and jealous respect of Time—to say nothing of our Aristotelian lessons—totally unlike anything that existed under Eliza and James, as a general proficiency of the Art—as a step gained in the National Criticism. TALBOYS. Ay, it must be difficult in the extreme for us so to divest ourselves of our own intellectual habits and proficiency as to take up, and into our own, the mind of that Age. But, unless we do so, we are unable to judge what might or might not happen to any one mind of that age; and when we affirm that Shakspeare must have known what he was doing in regard to the Time of Othello, we are suffering under the described difficulty or disability— NORTH. Why, Talboys, you are coming, day after day, to talk better and better sense—take care you do not get too sensible— TALBOYS. We must never forget, sir, that the management of the Time was on that Stage a slighted and trampled element—that what Willy gives us of it is gratuitous, and what we must be thankful for—and finally, that he did not distinctly scheme out, in his own conception, the Time of Othello—very far from it. NORTH.