It is a curious fact, recorded by Th. Elze, and quoted by Mr. Horace Howard Furness, in his Appendix to _The Merchant of Venice_, that at the time of the action of that drama, in Shakspere’s own day, there was living in Padua a professor of the University whose characteristics fully and entirely corresponded with all the qualities of “Old Bellario,” and with all the requisites of the play. In his concluding passages Elze described the University of Padua at the close of the Sixteenth Century, when there were representatives of twenty-three nations among its students. He said that not a few Englishmen took up their abode in Padua, for a longer or a shorter time, for the purposes of study; all of whom must naturally have visited Venice. “And,” he added, “if it has been hitherto impossible to prove that Shakspere drew his knowledge of Venice and Padua, and the region about, from personal observation, it is quite possible to suppose that he obtained it by word of mouth, either from Italians living in England, [Illustration: THE COUNCIL-CHAMBER OF THE DOGES. IN OTHELLO’S TIME] or from Englishmen who had pursued their studies at Padua.” Among the significant names given by Elze as students at Padua are Rosenkranz, in 1587 to 1589, and Guldenstern, in 1603. One of the most distinguished of the English representatives who took up his abode in Padua in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, was Oliver Goldsmith, who, according to John Forster, received his degree there, although there is no official record of such a fact. Signor Giuseppe Tassini, in his _Curiosità Veneziane_, published in 1863, gives the following account of what is known as “Othello’s House,” which has, in all probability, never before been put into English, and is here roughly translated. At the right-hand side of the Campo del Carmine, or on the little canal of the same name, he says, in effect, stands what is left of an ancient palace supposed, but incorrectly, to have belonged once to an influential family called Moro. Christoforo Moro, a cadet of the house, was sent to Cyprus in 1505; and he returned in 1508 to relate to the magnificos of his native city his adventures there, having in the meantime lost his first wife. In 1515 he was married again, and to Demonia Bianco, daughter of Donato da Lazze. Rawdon Brown and other writers, continues Signor Tassini, believe that upon this hint Shakspere spoke, making Othello a Moor, as a play upon the name Moro, and turning Demonia Bianco into Desdemona. But he adds that the Goro, not the Moro, family lived here in the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, the latter occupying a palace in the Campo di S. Giovanni Decollato, now the Campo S. Zan Degolà, some distance away.