reasonable ground exists for difference of opinion. There is no ground for difference of opinion as to certain qualities in the character of Othello and certain passages in the tragedy,-notably the scene at Cyprus and the last scene. Shakspere's Othello is neither sensual, animal, nor ferocious: he is manly, magnanimous, fearless, confiding, noble, romantic, and tender, and at the culmination of his terrible experience he is an authentic type of woeful grandeur. The last scene of the tragedy might well be selected as a test scene. There stands the poetic text, and it cannot be evaded. Othello has been so ravaged by contending passions and by grief that he has twice fallen in epilepsy. 'He looks gentler than he did." When he enters the chamber he comes as the minister of Fate. He is absolutely quiet. "It is the cause." The death of Desdemona has been ordained. She is lovely and greatly loved "yet she must die, else she 'll betray more men." The afflicted man stands gazing at his beautiful wife, quiescent in her slumber. He puts out the light, and as he does so he murmurs, uttering his heart in words of solemn beauty:

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"If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, I can again thy former light restore, Should I repent me:-but once put out thy light,

Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
Which can thy light relume. When I have
plucked the rose

I cannot give it vital growth again,
It needs must wither."

Three times he kisses the sleeping Desdemona, but so gently that she knows it not and does not waken. The exquisite loveliness and innocence of Desdemona, in

which he has believed, and a dreadful wickedness of her conduct, which he has been beguiled to credit, unite to overwhelm him, and he weeps:

"But they are cruel tears: this sorrow 's heavenly;

It strikes where it doth love."

Here is no fury, no tigerish convulsion. It is the soul that speaks. "Have you prayed to-night," he asks, when at length the poor child has wakened. "I would not kill thy unprepared spirit." It is not until, as he believes, she utters a falsehood, even in the presence of death, when he has bade her make her peace with Heaven, that Othello's wildness momentarily returns upon him:

"Thou dost stone my heart, And mak'st me call what I intend to do A murder, which I thought a sacrifice."

And even in the very commission of the dreadful deed there is mercy: "I would not have thee linger in thy pain." The student who can find in that awful and pathetic scene any warrant for such acting as Salvini and various other foreigners,notably Rossi and Novelli,—have provided for its illustration, must be peculiar in the faculty of discernment.

Othello-not Romeo-is the supreme representative lover, unmatched, as such, in all Shakspere and all fiction, and the play is the supreme dramatic exposition of all the tragedy that can be born of love.

Much might be written, if space permitted, of the many performers of Desdemona, and indeed of many players of distinction in several of the associate characters. All the parts are good ones for artistic representation. Many portraits exist of actors who have gained fame in this tragedy. The student finds difficulty, however, in reconciling conflicts of testimony relative to the players of the past; traits, particularly those which are desigand the observer early learns that the pornated "old prints," — are seldom authentic. As to some of them, indeed, the comment would be appropriate that was made by that once renowned lawyer and orator Rufus Choate concerning bad pictures: It would not be a sin to worship them— for they bear no likeness to anything that is in heaven above, or the earth beneath, or the water under the earth.

ble form the form of models, old and new. For the makers and the sailors of ships have always made models of their creations or sea homes.

While there are many models of ships in the world,-large numbers of them in government possession and others widely scattered, the private collectors of models are comparatively few. Yet they are among the most devoted of collectors. One of these is an interesting personality in the New York art world, who enjoys an advantage over his brother virtuosos, the collectors of productions of the fine arts or of curios and relics, in that he is the only collector who not only collects the works of others for his delectation, but also himself constructs the objects of his collecting fad. He is the portrait-painter Irving R. Wiles. One of the handsomest and most shipshape of the models Mr. Wiles has made is a brilliant reproduction-made to scale within a total length of nineteen inches of a British ship-of-the-line of the seventeenth century. The model is of a secondrate line-of-battle-ship, the date of the building of which would be approximately 1665. She stands in all her rigging, but without sails, a beautiful demonstration of the skill and patience of an artist turned artisan. The picturesque, the romantic, the majestic are all suggested in this elaborate and resplendent representation of a man-of-war in days when men went to

colors are lost in the accompanying illustration, with much of the elaboration of the ornamental detail, the fine lines of the ship and the intricacies of the rigging speak for themselves, even in black and white. What with the very short mizzenmast and the rakish lateen yard, the towering mainmast, and the tall foremast, and especially the jaunty, cocky little spritsail-mast and yard putting up a bold front above the lion-figured bow, this effective little model presents a crisp and cutting nautical picture of the "oaken walls of England" of two or more centuries ago.

The masts are wound, as the split masts of those days were and as the masts of great ships are now, and the standing rigging is in place, as is about everything else that the old ships carried, save the innumerable flags and pennants that they flew, and these will probably go aboard yet. She has a white bottom, green sides, and red wales. The gunwale, top-timber-line, channel-wale, and main-wale are all defined in color and in relief. The lower ports are plain, but the upper ones are wreathed in gilt in floral forms. Gilded scrolls adorn the topsides of the quarterdeck, where trophies of a ship's prowess used to be represented in carvings in high relief. The outstanding quarter-galleries, whence the officers could look forward along the decks and see the men, and where, too, they could get cloistered exer

cise, are all put on with the most painstaking care; and above the galleries at the after end sits a modeled figure of a woman, possibly a British Venus risen high above the waves. An ornamental rudderhead complements the figurehead of the lion, which holds a shield under the little spritsail-mast far away forward. An elaborate group in plastic work, embodying Neptune and some of his suite, occupies a lunette-shaped space across the stern just below the taffrail. The three lanterns, minutely ornamented, which characterized the ships of the day, are all here, projecting above and even abaft the stern, as they did of old. Here, too, on both decks, are portshutters which, al

The endless pains

required in the

the navy-yard at Boston, too, there was a model made of beef-bones by a British sailor in prison in 1812-the miniature vessel even planked with bones-which had excited his interest. Subsequently, on a trip to Paris, he went through the Musée de Marine, in the Louvre, and under the spell of the tall rows of models of all times, strung high upon those walls, his future recreation was fixed. He came home and set to work to make a model.

The British second-rater already described is a recent production of Mr. Wiles. His first work on his return from

to

Paris was the model of an American twenty-gun brig of the 1812 type, which is shown in the illustration with all sail set. This model is two feet long, and represents a one-hundred-foot brig; but it is not made to scale, as he had then only pictures to go by, and no working-plans guide him. Yet the model is good, and the rigging correct; it was perfected on later information. But the hull would not satisfy him now. Model collectors progress, like the collectors of paintings and porcelains, with the continued cultivation of the critical eye. One of the points of pride with the model-collector who makes his own models is in the perfection of the hull model. It is a keen aggravation to the collector whose nautical sympathies are delicate to find many of his purchases of models wanting in the proper proportions of the lower hull. For most models are made by sailors; and odd as it may seem, your sailorman, critical and exacting as he will be in all things about his decks and rigging, either does not understand or cannot reproduce the hull below the waterline. There is, for instance, in the museum at Salem, Massachusetts, a model of the old Ohio, a two-decker, which was

making of such an intricate example of the model-maker's workmanship leads often to the question, how a painter of portraits came to turn his hand to such a task. The truth is that Mr. Wiles really fell upon his hobby, and he rides it for recreation. His diversion His diversion had been music, particularly playing the violin, which was his companion in the hours when there was no light for the brush. But he found, as his duties as a painter became more arduous, that the violin was no longer a recreation: it was another art, and all arts are exacting mistresses. So for relief he turned his mind once more to ships and the sea, which had fascinated him years before.

As a boy he had sought the water-front of Manhattan to study and admire the square-riggers that came thither more often then than they do to-day, and he had gone many times to the Brooklyn navy-yard to see the Government's models, which have since been transferred to Annapolis. In