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the thought that the honourable lago, with his evil comments on the love of Desdemona for the Moor, is not all in the wrong. Most repulsive of all to me are Othello's remarks on the damp hand of his wife. There is just such a marvellous and significant example of love for a negro, such as we see in Titus Andronicus and Othello, in the " Arabian Nights' Entertainments," where a beautiful prin- cess, who is also a sorceress, keeps her husband bound in a statue-like immovability, and beats him daily with rods because he slew her negro lover. Heartrending are the wails of the princess over the bier of the black corpse, which she by her magic art keeps in a kind of apparent life and covers with the kisses of despair, and which sho would fain, by the greater magic of love, wake from its twilight-dimmering half death to the full truth of life. Even as a boy I was struck in reading the Arabian tale with this picture of passionate and incomprehensible love. 1 1 There are among the legends of the peasants in the Romagna Toscana two which strangely recall this comment. One is of a lady who becomes enceinte by merely looking at a black or Moorish wizard, the other is of a young girl who keeps under her bed in a chest the petrified body of her dead lover, which she every night " covers with the kisses of despair," aa Heine describes it Translator.