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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9 th a n. NOV. 19, m

houses adjacent the poet Edmund Spenser died in 1599. I never could learn in which house this event took place, but several of them looked three hundred years old.

And now the only really old portion remaining of this queer, quaint quadrangle, formerly Ixmnded by Downing Street, King Street, Delahay Street, and Great George Street, is the piece that lies between the one remaining side of Charles Street and the back of Great George Street, being one or two tumbledown lanes or dinghy mews running through from Delahay Street to King Street.

In Delahay Street itself demolitions and repairs are going on, but on one of the doors stul stands the brass plate of the late Sir Charles Hutton Gregory, a kindly, genial man, formerly president of the Institution of Civil Engineers. I often saw him, but never, I think, without a cigar in his mouth, and I well remember that the first time I called upon him he offered me one. I wish he could do so again. Sir John Wolfe Barry, engineer of the Tower Bridge, also lives in this street, in a house which has a charming view over St. James's Park.

So as an old fogey, in closing these notes from memory on a locality dear to me from my boyhood's days, whilst I admit that im- provements have been effected, I cannot but regret the destruction of many old land- marks. WALTEK HAMILTON.

Elms Road, Clapham Common.

SHAKSPEAR1ANA.

83, 283, 422, 483 ; ii. 203). At the last refer- ence C. C. B. says : " It is not the sense but the sound of the line that, primarily, I object to "; and again, among other epithets piled up against it, he denounces it as "harsh- sounding." We have had enough of mere assertion, than which nothing is easier, as nothing is more inconclusive. Will C. C. B. please now have done with assertion, and favour us with proof 1 I shall put the two lines, the one in the text, and the one as I believe Shakespeare wrote it, properly scanned, side by side, thus :
 * OTHELLO,' I. i. 21 (5 th S. xi. 383 ; 9 th S. i.

A fellow almost damn'd in a fa/ir wife. A fellow all must ddmn in affa/irs wise.

I now ask C. C. B. not to assert, but to prove, that there is one whit more harshness in the second line than in the first. To me, in this respect, they are as like as two peas ; in harshness of sound, if harshness there be, they are as identical as A sharp and B flat.

I am obliged to MR. YARDLEY for his note,

though I did not expect it from him. When one of his well-known intelligence must resort to such shifts in defence of the line as it stands in the text, it is demonstrated inde- fensible. According to MR. YARDLEY, Cassio had been an uxorious husband, now un- manned by his wife's elopement with another. All this he finds in this one line ! " Perhaps," he adds, " no one but lago knew of the marriage." I am amazed that MR. YARDLEY does not see that if the meaning which he attaches to the line is the true one, lago refers to Cassio's marriage, &c., as matters of public notoriety, known to Roderigo, known to everybody. Yet not even in the soliloquy in Act I. sc. iii. does lago allude to Cassio's marital misfortunes. One almost demented on account of them would scarcely have been spoken of as " one framed to make women false." According to MR. YARDLEY he was not " framed " to keep even one woman true. R. M. SPENCE, D.D.

Manse of Arbuthnott, N.B.

What may be thought to run counter to my opinion is Cassio's answer to lago, " I marry her," &c. He expresses himself as if he were free to marry her. But he may have been divorced from his wife ; he may have believed that lago did not know of his marriage. In either case he might make the answer. If anything further were wanted in favour of keeping the line unaltered, I would urge that Shakspeare may have for- gotten towards the end of his play what he had said in the beginning. He sometimes does so. For example, in the fifth act of ' Richard III.,' Buckingham says :

Thus Margaret's curse falls heavy on my neck. But Margaret in the first act had specially exempted Buckingham from her curse. Buckingham remembers the words of Mar- garet, whilst he forgets that she would not curse him. Rivers also, in the third act, says that Buckingham was cursed :

Then cursed she Hastings, then cursed she Buck- ingham.

E. YARDLEY. ' OTHELLO,' I. ii. 11-14.

Be assured of this, That the magnifico is much beloved, And hath in his effect a voice potential As double as the duke's.

lago starts to say that Brabantio's voice is, in its effect upon the findings of the council, as potential as that of the duke himself ; in the act of speech, however, he finds himself debating if the magnifico's voice be not much more powerful than that of the duke, recur- ring in his thought to the idea that the mag-