pit, or gallery) on the back of the flying Arabian, completely apparelled as the American Apollo. I have seen the Kentucky voltigeur introduce a fancy-dance on two wild steeds, and jump through a fiery hoop in the character of Shylock; and I confess I liked him better in those happy days at New York, than since he has proclaimed himself as the great transatlantic tragedian, and has set up as an infallible critic because he has proved himself a fallible actor. And then the death of Desdemona! My dear Smith--I appeal to your own noble feelings, as a husband and a Christian,--if you thought Mrs Smith a little too fond of Cassio--or any other lieutenant,--if you even found she had given him one of your best handkerchiefs to make him a nightcap--nay, if you had determined even to achieve widowerhood with your own hands, would you take the instrument Othello uses for the purpose? I ask you as a man and a gentleman. You would borrow a pistol--you would take up a knife--you would purchase arsenic--but you would not undergo the personal fatigue of Burking her in her bed! But it is not with you I have to do just now. I go back to Shakspeare and his times--and I maintain that the manner of Desdemona's murder could only be tolerable in the state of society at the time it was presented. I suspect the very appliances of the modern stage bring the repulsiveness of the incident more prominently forward. There is a beautifully furnished room--a dressing-table beside the bed--nice curtains drawn all round it--snow-white sheets, and a pair of very handsome bed-room candles. The bed-room is brought too prominently forward; and when Desdemona is discovered asleep, it needs all the magic of Shakspeare's name, and the reverence that his genius has created and maintains, even upon the shilling gallery, to prevent the tragic interest from turning into another channel. The contrast is too great between the truthfulness of the bed-curtains and easy-chair, and the horrid purpose--which ought to be idealized, and not realized--for which the Moor enters the room. It is a frightful, blackfaced murderer--designed in the seventeenth century, and considered true to nature then, coming into the open daylight of the nineteenth, casting his Elizabethan energies into forms repulsive to the sentiments of our VICTORIAN time; and we should also feel, if the play were presented to us for the first time, that an Othello created by Shakspeare--if he had been left for these latter times--would not have murdered his wife with a pillow--if he had murdered her at all--and would not have brought forward on the stage the bed-room of a jealous husband, with his wife expecting his approach. The barrenness of the stage in Shakspeare's time was an advantage in a scene like this;--when people were told to fancy that old bench was a bed, and that the close-shaved stripling reclining on it was a woman--the imagination was set down to a feast of its own: the scanty scenery