already crumbling summit of Mount Ararat. Yet it will be a thousand years more, in all probability, before the last thunderbolt ceases to be shown as a curiosity here and there to marvelling visitors, and takes its proper place in some village museum as a belemnite, a meteoric stone, or a polished axe head of our neolithic ancestors. Even then, no doubt, the original bolt will still survive as a recognised property in the stock-in-trade of every well-equipped poet. -_Cornhill Magazine._ THE LOCAL COLOR OF “ROMEO AND JULIET.” BY WILLIAM ARCHER. “Romeo and Juliet” affords a good illustration of the fallacy which lies at the root of the Shakespearologists’ panegyrics of the poet’s “local color.” We are told that every touch and tint is correctly and vividly Italian. Schlegel, Coleridge, and Philarète Chasles have sought to concentrate in impassioned word-pictures the coloring at once of “Romeo and Juliet” and of Italy. What Shakespeare designed to paint, in vivid but perfectly general hues, was an ideal land of love, a land of moonlight and nightingales, a land to which he had certainly travelled, perhaps before leaving the banks of the Avon. It happens that Italy, of all countries in the material world, most closely resembles this fairyland of the youthful fantasy. If we must place it on the earth at all, we place it there. Therefore did Shakespeare willingly accept the Italian names for scene and characters provided in his original; and, therefore, our scenic artists very properly draw their inspiration from Italian orange groves and Italian palaces. But it is a fundamental error to regard Romeo and Juliet as specifically Italians, or their country as Italy and nothing but Italy. Their pure-humanity is of no race, their Italy has no latitude or longitude. Shakespeare could not if he would, and would not if he could, have given it the minutely accurate local color of which we hear so much. Could not if he would, for even the most devout believers in his visit to Italy place it after the date of “Romeo and Juliet” and before that of “The Merchant of Venice.” Now, to maintain that the poet evolved Italian local color out of his inner consciousness is merely a piece of the supernaturalism which infects Shakespearology. Schiller, by diligent study and conversations with Goethe, grasped the cruder local colors of Switzerland, but Shakespeare had no means or opportunity for such study, and no Goethe to aid him. By lifelong love two modern Englishmen have attempted to construct an Italy in their imagination; Rossetti quite successfully, Mr. Shorthouse more or less so. Shakespeare had neither the motives nor the means for attempting any such feat.