world of itself--Lord of his will--Lord of his Wife. TALBOYS. I feel, sir, in this view much poetical demonstration--although mathematical none--and in such a case Poetry is your only Principia. NORTH. Your hand. But if, my dear Seward, Shakspeare elects time at Venice, he wilfully clouds his two excellent Persons with many shadows of indecorum, and clogs his Action with a procedure and a state of affairs, which your Imagination loses itself in attempting to define--with improbabilities--with impracticabilities--with impossibilities. If he was resolute to have a well-sustained logic of Time, I say it was better for him to have his Two Months distinct at Cyprus. I say that, with his creative powers, if he was determined to have Two Calendar Months, from the First of May to the First of July, and then in One Day distinctly the first suspicion sown and the murder done, nothing could have been easier to him than to have imagined, and indicated, and hurried over the required gap of time; and that he would have been bound to prefer this course to that inexplicable marriage and no marriage at Venice. BULLER. How he clears his way! NORTH. But Shakspeare, my dear Boys, had a better escape. Wittingly or unwittingly, he exempted himself from the obligation of walking by the Calendar. He knew--or he felt that the fair proportionate structure of the Action required liberal time at Cyprus. He took it; for there it is, recognised in the consciousness of every sitting or standing spectator. He knew, or he felt, that the passionate expectation to be sustained in the bosoms of his audience required a rapidity of movement in his Murder-Plot, and it moves on feet of fire. SEWARD. Venice is beginning to fade from my ken. NORTH. The first of all necessities towards the Criticism of the Play, Seward, is to convince yourself that there was not--could not be a time of concealed marriage at Venice--that it is not hinted, and is not inferable. BULLER. Shall we give in, Seward? SEWARD. Yes. NORTH. You must go to the TREMENDOUS DOUBLE TIME AT CYPRUS, knowing that the solution is to be had there, or nowhere. If you cast back a longing lingering look towards Venice, you are lost. Put mountains and waves between you and the Queen of the Sea. Help yourself through at Cyprus, or perish in the adventure. TALBOYS. Through that Mystery, you alone, sir, are the Man to help us through--and you must. NORTH. Not now--to-morrow. Till then be revolving the subject occasionally in your minds. TALBOYS. Let's off to the Pike-ground at Kilchurn. _Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh._ [Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.] End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 67, Number 414, April, 1850, by Various