Apropos to the historical characters, I hope you have refuted that _insolent_ assumption, (shall I call it?) that Shakspeare tampered inexcusably with the truth of history. He is the truest of all historians. His anachronisms always remind me of those in the fine old Italian pictures; either they are insignificant, or, if properly considered, are really beauties; for instance, every one knows that Correggio's St. Jerome presenting his books to the Virgin, involves half-a-dozen anachronisms,--to say nothing of that heavenly figure of the Magdalen, in the same picture, kissing the feet of the infant Saviour. Some have ridiculed, some have excused this strange combination of inaccuracies but is it less one of the divinest pieces of sentiment and poetry that ever breathed and glowed from the canvas? You remember too the famous nativity by some Neapolitan painter, who has placed Mount Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples in the background? In these and a hundred other instances, no one seems to feel that the apparent absurdity involves the highest truth, and that the sacred beings thus represented, if once allowed as objects of faith and worship, are eternal under every aspect, and independent of all time and all locality. So it is with Shakspeare and his anachronisms. The learned scorn of Johnson and some of his brotherhood of commentators, and the eloquent defence of Schlegel, seem in this case superfluous. If he chose to make the Delphic oracle and Julio Romano contemporary--what does it signify? he committed no anachronisms of character. He has not metamorphosed Cleopatra into a turtle-dove, nor Katherine of Arragon into a sentimental heroine. He is true to the spirit and even to the _letter_ of history; where he deviates from the latter, the reason may be found in some higher beauty and more universal truth. ALDA. I have proved this, I think, by placing parallel with the dramatic character all the historic testimony I could collect relative to Constance, Cleopatra, Katherine of Arragon, &c. MEDON. Analyzing the character of Cleopatra must have been something like catching a meteor by the tail, and making it sit for its picture. ALDA. Something like it, in truth; but those of Miranda and Ophelia were more embarrassing, because they seemed to defy all analysis. It was like intercepting the dew-drop or the snow-flake ere it fell to earth, and subjecting it to a chemical process. MEDON. Some one said the other day that Shakspeare had never drawn a coquette. What is Cleopatra but the empress and type of all the coquettes that ever were--or are? She would put Lady ---- herself to school. But now for the moral. ALDA. The moral!--of what? MEDON. Of your book. It has a moral, I suppose. ALDA.