This was advice that could not have proceeded from any common mind. The foundation of a right understanding of Shakspere is love. Steevens read again and again without love, and therefore without understanding. Boswell, the editor of Malone's posthumous edition, speaking of a note on 'Hamlet,' says, that Steevens has expressed himself "with as much asperity as if he had had a personal quarrel with the author." Steevens had a Bettifogging mind, without a particle of lofty feeling, without imagination, without even a logical apprehension of the small questions to which he applied himself. But he was wonderfully laborious. Knowing nothing of the principles of philosophical criticism, he spared no pains in hunting up illustrative facts; he dabbled in classical learning so as to be able to apply a quotation with considerable neatness; and he laboured his style into epigrammatic smartness which passed for wit. The vicious style of the letters of Junius was evidently his model; and what that cowardly libeller had been in the political world Steevens was ambitious to be in the literary. He very often attacked, under a mask, those with whom he mixed in intimate companionship; till at last his name became a byword for meanness and malignity. It was impossible that such a man could have written about Shakspere without displaying as much asperity as if he had had a personal quarrel with him." And yet he was to be pitied. Like Hamlet, he had a task laid upon him above his powers. Early in life he attached himself to literature and literary pursuits, not from any necessity, for his fortune was ample, but with a real and sincere devotion. He attached himself to Shakspere. He became an editor of Shakspere. He was associated with Johnson in the preparation of an edition, and what he did in his own way was far superior to what his colleague had effected without him. He gave a new tone to the critical illustration of Shakspere, by bringing not only the elegant literature of Shakspere's own age to compare with him, but by hunting over all the sweepings of the book-stalls of the same age, to find the application of a familiar allusion, or the mean

66

ing of an uncommon word. But he became ambitious to show his power of writing, as well as his diligence. If we turn over the variorum editions, and light upon a note which contains something like a burst of genial admiration for the author, we find the name of Warburton affixed to it. Warburton's intellect was capacious enough for love of Shakspere. But he delighted in decorating his opinions with the tinsel of his own paradoxes. Steevens was the man to pull off the tinsel; but he did it after the fashion in which the lace was stripped from Brother Jack's coat :-"Courteous reader, you are given to understand that zeal is never so highly obliged as when you set it a-tearing ; and Jack, who doted on that quality in himself, allowed it at this time its full swing. Thus it happened that, stripping down a parcel of gold lace a little too hastily, he rent the main body of his coat from top to bottom; and, whereas his talent was not of the happiest in taking up a stitch, he knew no better way than to darn it again with packthread and a skewer.” * The zeal for tearing increased with Steevens. He retired for fifteen years from the editorship of Shakspere, to recreate himself in the usual way in which such minds find diversion-by anonymous attacks upon his literary contemporaries. But in 1793 he returned with renewed vigour to his labour of love, the defacing of Shakspere. Malone, in the interval, had been working hard, though perhaps with no great talent, in the endeavour to preserve every vestige of his author. He was successful, and Steevens was thenceforward his enemy. He would no longer walk in the path that he had once trod. He rejected all his old conservative opinions. In his edition of 1793, he sets out in his Advertisement with the following well-known manifesto against a portion of the works of Shakspere, the supposed merit or demerit of which, it is perfectly evident, must have been applied as a standard for other portions of Shakspere's poetical excellence :-" We have not reprinted the Sonnets, &c., of Shakspeare, because the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers

* Tale of a Tub.'

into their service; notwithstanding these miscellaneous poems have derived every possible advantage from the literature and judgment of their only intelligent editor, Mr. Malone, whose implements of criticism, like the ivory rake and golden spade in Prudentius, are on this occasion disgraced by the objects of their culture. Had Shakspeare produced no other works than these, his name would have reached us with as little celebrity as time has conferred on that of Thomas Watson, an older and much more elegant sonnetteer." Brother Jack is here not only tearing the coat, but throwing the waistcoat into the fire. Let us hear how he means to deal with the coat itself:-" But, as we are often reminded by our brethren of the craft' that this or that emendation, however apparently necessary, is not the genuine text of Shakspeare, it might be imagined that we had received this text from its fountain-head, and were therefore certain of its purity. Whereas few literary occurrences are better understood than that it came down to us discoloured by 'the variation of every soil' through which it had flowed, and that it stagnated at last in the muddy reservoir of the first folio: in plainer terms, that the vitiations of a careless theatre were seconded by those of as ignorant a press. The integrity of dramas thus prepared for the world is just on a level with the innocence of females nursed in a camp and educated in a bagnio. As often, therefore, as we are told that, by admitting corrections warranted by common sense and the laws of metre, we have not rigidly adhered to the text of Shakspeare, we shall entreat our opponents to exchange that phrase for another 'more germane,' and say, instead of it, that we have deviated from the text of the publishers of single plays in quarto, or their successors, the editors of the first folio; that we have sometimes followed the suggestions of a Warburton, a Johnson, a Farmer, or a Tyrwhitt, in preference to the decisions of a Hemings or a Condell, notwithstanding their choice of readings might have been influenced by associates whose high-sounding names cannot fail to enforce respect, viz., William Ostler, John Shanke,

William Sly and Thomas Poope." Again :"It is time, instead of a timid and servile adherence to ancient copies, when (offending against sense and metre) they furnish no real help, that a future editor, well acquainted with the phraseology of our author's age, should be at liberty to restore some apparent meaning to his corrupted lines, and a decent flow to his obstructed versification. The latter (as already has been observed) may be frequently effected by the expulsion of useless and supernumerary syllables, and an occasional supply of such as might fortuitously have been omitted, notwithstanding the declaration of Hemings and Condell, whose fraudulent preface asserts that they have published our author's plays 'as absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.' Till somewhat resembling the process above suggested be authorized, the public will ask in vain for a commodious and pleasant text of Shakspeare. Nothing will be lost to the world on account of the measure recommended, there being folios and quartos enough remaining for the use of antiquarian or critical travellers, to whom a jolt over a rugged pavement may be moie delectable than an easy passage over a smooth one, though they both conduct to the same object."

And this, then, is the text of Shakspere that England has rejoiced in for half a century! These are the labours, whether of correction or of critical opinion, that have made Shakspere "popular." The critical opinions have ceased, we believe, to have any effect except amongst a few pedantic persons, who fancy that it is cleverer to dispraise than to admire. But the text as corrupted by Steevens is that which is generally put into the hands of the readers of Shakspere. The number of editions of the text alone of Shakspere printed during the present century is by no means inconsiderable; and of these editions, which are constantly multiplying, there are many thousand copies year by year supplying the large and increasing demand for a knowledge of our greatest poet. With very few exceptions, indeed, all these editions are copies of some edition whose received text is considered as

graphical errors. the words of the title-page of what is called the trade edition, is "From the text of the corrected copies left by the late George Steevens, Esq., and Edmund Malone, Esq." If we were to suppose, from this title, that Steevens and Malone had agreed together to leave a text for the benefit of posterity, we should be signally deceived. The received text is that produced by Steevens, when he fancied himself "at liberty to restore some apparent meaning to Shakspeare's corrupted lines, and a decent flow to his obstructed versification." Malone was walking in his own track, that of extreme caution, and an implicit reliance on the very earliest copies. The text of his edition of 1821, though deformed with abundant marks of carelessness, is an honest text, if we admit the principle upon which it is founded. But the text of Steevens, in which the peculiar versification of Shakspere, especially its freedom, its vigour, its variety of pause, its sweetness, its majesty, are sacrificed to what he called polished versification," has been received for nearly half a century as the standard text.

Hayley, the head of the school of English poetry "in the most high and palmy state" of Steevens, wrote his epitaph, which conIcludes with these lines :

"This tomb may perish, but not so his name, Who shed new lustre upon Shakspeare's fame."

This may run by the side of Johnson's praise of a sermonizing note of Warburton :-" It almost sets the critic on a level with the author." Steevens, shedding new lustre upon Shakspere! Warburton, almost upon a level with Shakspere! Thus men talked in those days, when their notion of poetry was simply that it was not prose. Something in which the mechanical form was to be obviously distinguished from other forms of composition -a sermon, an essay-was poetry. They looked for no inner life in poetry, no organization of its own, that should determine its form. They looked for eight or ten syllable verse, for blank verse or couplet. They

and a moral. When they found not the moral, they shook their heads. When they found what they called "superfluous syllables" in Shakspere's lines, out went the syllables, by carrying over a word to the next line, sometimes of two, sometimes of three syllables. If there was a gap left, it was filled up with rubbish. The excess of the second line was carried over to the third, till a halting-place was found or made. This was mending the metre. Mending the moral was not quite so easy to the editors; they left that task to the players, who, to do them justice, were in no degree slow to set about the work with the most laudable emulation of the labours of the critics. They cut out a scene here, and put in another there. Lear' was to end with a jig, and 'Hamlet' with a song. The manager-botchers, however, in time grew timid. They wanted new Tates to make new happy endings, but the age of George III. was not luxuriant enough to produce such daring geniuses. The managers, therefore, were obliged to be content with the glorious improvements of the seventeenth century in all essentials. But they did what they could. Shakspere's songs were poor simple things; they had no point; not much about love in them; nothing of loyalty; and so Shakspere's comedies were always presented with new songs by the salaried poet of "the house," for "the house" kept a poet, as the maker of razor-strops did in those days. But GARRICK, the twin-star of Shakspere

In the

And earth irradiate with a beam divine"had many a twinkle of his own. 'Biographia Dramatica' we have a list of thirty-nine plays by Garrick :-" He is well known to have been the author of the following, some of which are originals, and the rest translations or alterations from other authors, with a design to adapt them to the present taste of the public." (A predecessor printed upon the title of a tragedy of which in a similar way he was "the author," King Lear, a Tragedy: by Nahum Tate.')

languages, teaches no more; learning, in its best sense, is only nature at the rebound; it is only the discovery of what is; and he who looks upon nature with a penetrating eye derives learning from the source. Rules of poetry have been deduced from examples, and not examples from rules: as a poet, therefore, Shakspeare did not need books; and in no instance in which he needed them as a philosopher or historian does he appear ignorant of what they teach.

"His language, like his conceptions, is strongly marked with the characteristic of nature; it is bold, figurative, and significant; his terms, rather than his sentences, are metaphorical; he calls an endless multitude a sea, by a happy allusion to the perpetual succession of wave to wave; and he immediately expresses opposition by taking up arms, which, being fit in itself, he was not solicitous to accommodate to his first image. This is the language in which a figurative and rapid conception will always be expressed this is the language both of the prophet and the poet, of native eloquence and divine inspiration.

"It has been objected to Shakspeare that he wrote without any moral purpose; but I boldly reply that he has effected a thousand. He has not, indeed, always contrived a series of events from the whole of which some moral precept may be inferred; but he has conveyed some rule of conduct, some principle of knowledge, not only in almost every speech of his dialogue, but in every incident, character, and event."

We would attempt to deprive no man of his fame; but the passage which we have just transcribed appears to us so contrary to the habits of thought which Garrick must have acquired from his theatrical practice, so opposed to the recorded opinions to which he was in the habit of looking up almost with slavish reverence, that we cannot receive the records of the Stratford Jubilee as evidence that he wrote it. What-was the manufacturer of Shakspere's plays into farces, and operas, and tragedies with moral endings, to be the first man in England to discover that Shakspere was a creator; that he lived in a world of his own creation; that the

| practice of art went before the rules; that the question of his learning was to be settled contrary to the way in which the pedants of criticism had settled it, by the proof that his knowledge was all-abundant; that his judgment was sufficient to rein his imagination; that he worked upon system, and was therefore an artist in the highest sense of the word; that what has been called the confusion of his metaphors was the language both of the prophet and the poet; that his moral purpose was to be collected incidentally, not only through informal speeches, but in every character and event? The beginning and the end of Garrick's oration is commonplace. Here is a flood of light shed upon the English opinion of Shakspere. Was there any man in England, at that time, whose philosophy was large enough, whose knowledge was comprehensive enough, to allow him to think thus? Was there any man in England who dared so to express himself, in the face of authorities who had so recently propounded a totally different system? There was but one man that we can dream of, and he was Edmund Burke. We cannot think that Garrick wrote these sentences. We can hardly think that he knew the full force of what he was uttering. It would be a dreary task to attempt to trace all that was published about Shakspere from the date of Johnson's first edition to the close of the eighteenth century. A few out of the heap of these forgotten emanations of the critical mind, the multitude of which proves the strong direction of the national admiration, may not be unprofitably noticed. Johnson, when he has dismissed Shakspere from the shackles of the unities, says, "I am almost frighted at my own temerity." He dreaded the advocates of a contrary opinion," as Æneas withdrew from the defence of Troy when he saw Neptune shaking the wall." A Neptune arrived from Scotland in the shape of 'Cursory Remarks on Tragedy.' This work, though it dropped into oblivion, was the performance of W. RICHARDSON, "Professor of Humanity in the University of Glasgow." A small specimen will suffice:-" with an impartiality which becomes every man that dares to think for