If you do not remember the passage in Bacon's Essays {251} about 'not to decide, etc.' I must have fancied it. I am glad you recognize the Othello bit of Montaigne. You know, as I know, the nonsense of talking of Shakespeare stealing such things: one is simply pleased at finding his footsteps in the Books he read, just as one is in walking over the fields he walked about Stratford and seeing the Flowers, and hearing the Birds, he heard and saw, and told of. My Canon is, there is no plagiarism when he who adopts has proved that he could originate what he adopts, and a great deal more: which certainly absolves Shakespeare from any such Charge--even 'The Cloud capt Towers, etc.' That Passage in Othello about the Propontic and the Hellespont, was, I have read, an afterthought, after reading some Travel: and, like so many Afterthoughts, I must think, a Blunder: breaking the Torrent of Passion with a piece of Natural History. One observes it particularly when acted: the actor down on his Knees, etc. Were I to act Othello (there'd be many a Bellow From Pit, Boxes, etc., on that occasion) {252} I should leave out the passage. . . . An answer from Carlyle's Niece to my half-yearly enquiry tells me that he is well, and hardy, and reading Goethe which he never tires of: glancing over Reviews which he calls 'Floods of Nonsense,' etc. I sent them Groome's 'Only Darter,' which I think so good that I shall get him to let me print it for others beside those of the Ipswich Journal: it seems to me a beautiful Suffolk 'Idyll' (why not _Ei_dyll?) and so it seemed to those at Chelsea. By the by, I will send you their Note, if Groome returns it to me. _To C. E. Norton_. _July_ 2/78. MY DEAR NORTON,