ful writer for the stage might snap his fingers at any single patron, since the public would take him under its wing. The young Warwickshire adventurer had probably not long to seek for his proper vocation. Whatever may have been his worth as a performer, there can be little doubt that he speedily became useful to managers, at first in altering or amending other men's plays, and then, and probably some time before the date of any one of his extant dramas, in writing histories, comedies, and tragedies, or part and parcels of them, on his own account.

In Shakspeare's history much is apocryphal and much irretrievably lost. Even now, after all the research bestowed on the subject, after disturbing ancestral spiders in every nook of will offices, muniment rooms, and parish chests, we have advanced little beyond Steevens' summary, that 'all that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakspeare is, that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon-married and had children there went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays-returned to Stratford, made his will, died and was buried. Yet amid this barrenness on all sides there is one green and firm spot, namely, that whatever may have been his early difficulties, Shakspeare was a prudent, practical, and consequently prosperous man, refusing no honest work, coining his brain for ducats honourably, laying by for the evil day, and investing his gains in good landed or other real securities. He realized a handsome property, equivalent perhaps to 1,000l. a year in our money, all of which, for anything that appears to the contrary, he made by a profession not remarkable for thrift, and without exciting among his contemporaries envy or ill-will. He achieved also by his well-directed labours the object which perhaps lay nearest to his heart; he regained, or more properly he improved the social position lost by his father. John Shakspeare inherited from his fathers, and acquired by marriage, land, money, flocks, and herds; yet he rose no higher in his native town than any equally endowed burgess might have risen, and the bitterness of his reverses must have been aggravated by the recollection of his alderman's gown and bailiff's chain and tippet. Whereas William Shakspeare, starting originally at a pecuniary zero, had, in process of time, a house in town on the Southwark side of the river,' had other houses in Stratford, bought any angulus iste' of land that pleased him in or about the same town, and finally took up his residence in New Place, and wrote himself gentleman' (and the Heralds' College was chary of granting the title of armiger in those days) in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation.'

Did Shakspeare scorn the degrees by which he did ascend

his vocation as an actor, the plays which he furnished to the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres, or the foresight and policy he had displayed as manager and shareholder in them? Did he, in the retrospect, esteem it a light thing to have so often won the smile of the royal Elizabeth, to have tickled the fancy of the less critical James, to have secured the favour, perhaps the friendship, of the gracious Southampton, or to have commanded for years the applause of listening multitudes? The indifference with which he seems to have treated the children of his brain would, on the one hand, incline us to think that he held cheap his art and mystery; on the other, all that he has written in his plays concerning the stage, its ministers and its offices, and all that we know of the wise, gentle, and genial temperament of the man forbid such a supposition. Wherefore, then, did he not extend to his dramatic offspring the same care which he bestowed on his poems; or, like Ben Jonson, revise, collect, and publish them himself? Perhaps the fell serjeant death arrested him: or the pleasures of quiet and independence, after years of agitation and uncertainty, led him to put off the pious duty: perchance, also, his estimate of the worth of these productions may have been a retarding and not an impelling motive.

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There is every reason to suppose Shakspeare to have been one of the least assuming of mankind. The almost universal favour and affection with which his contemporaries-and even the genus irritabile vatum'-regarded him, attest that, in his composition, vanity, envy, or arrogance had no place. Yet a man in whom the judicial faculty was so predominant in whatsoever relates to dramatic poetry, cannot have been insensible to the positive or relative value of such productions as Lear,' 'Hamlet,' and Othello,' or that magnificent cycle of histories which is the most living chronicle of English or Roman deeds. Yet, even with full consciousness that his Julius Cæsar,' as far surpassed the learned Jonson's Sejanus,' as Sejanus' surpassed the feeble old play of Appius and Virginia;' that his Rosalind, Beatrice, and Viola were copies of nature's women, and that Vittoria Corrombona, Evadne, and Lady Peregrine Would-be were either stage furies or fools, Shakspeare may have turned from his own creations with a feeling of dissatisfaction. When he remembered how often, in order to win the public ear, or to comply with the demands of the scene and its servants, he had curbed his better, and given rein to his worse fancies, and then contrasted what he had written with the archetype in his own brain and with his conception of the duties of his art, he may have looked back upon his Henries and Richards, on the noble

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Moor and his gentle lady, on the mad king and his daughters, on Ophelia and Hamlet, in a humbled spirit and with feelings akin to those which he has expressed in one of the saddest of his lyrical self-communings:

Oh! for my sake do you with fortune chide,

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide

Than public means which public manners breeds.
"Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand;
Pity me then and wish I were renewed.'

We must now quit this region of surmise for the history of the text and fortunes of Shakspeare's writings. We may at once dismiss the later folios as reprints only, with some doubtful plays annexed, and pass on to the first critical editions.

It has never been Shakspeare's fortune to have met with a Bentley or a Porson-with Bentley, that is to say, not slashing with his desperate hook on Milton, but earnestly and faithfully deciphering the corruptions of Suidas or Hesychius; with Porson, in the freshness of his intellect and scholarship, settling for ever the canon of iambic and anapæstic metres. Yet the living language of Shakspeare's text, as it was originally printed, needed little less sedulous care than the vitiated copies of Euripides or Eschylus. One misfortune, however, he had in common, and in full measure with the Greek dramatic poets. We are inclined to consider the Greek scholiasts, as a body, the most vapid and ignorant of mankind. Cowper, when engaged in translating Homer, complains heavily of the intolerable nugacity of the scholia collected by Villoison. I am almost blind,' he says, 'with reading them; but it is no matter, I shall be the more like Homer. For one sound reading, or one pertinent illustration or anecdote to be found in these ancient glosses, one has to wade through almost interminable pools of sluggish and stagnant water, with the further provocation of knowing that the annotators had before them, in some instances, the autographs, and in most, accurate transcripts of the originals. Shakspeare's commentators did not, indeed, enjoy this preliminary boon. The text they had to deal with was reeking with corrup tion: they are more excusable, therefore, for their shortcomings than the bookworms who maundered over Homer or Sophocles, in the library of the Ptolemies. But this concession is all we can afford the majority of the English scholiasts. They have aggravated their misfortune by nearly every conceivable fault. Some of them--we shall come presently to particular examples

have imagined that Shakspeare borrowed or 'conveyed' at least a half of his possessions from earlier writers, and, as Gibbon says of Sir John Dalrymple's Remarks on his 15th and 16th chapters, 'tracked him home with the pertinacity of a slow hound.' Others have thought that the best mode of rendering his meaning plain was to heap on his text Pelions and Ossas of obscure learning, as if rubbish to be shot here' had been inscribed on the general title of his works. A third order may be termed parasitical critics, that is to say, critics who prey, contrary to the law of nature, on their kind, and delight in worrying, contradicting, and reviling their precursors or contemporaries. Of most of them the common vice is self-laudation. On the credit of a few notes, they proceed doctors of the faculty, and almost justify Pope's satire on verbal critics. Meanwhile all insight into Shakspeare's meaning, all perception of the functions of poetry, all love of the great poet himself, and therefore all faith in his teaching and ministration, are as extinct in them as the fire among thorns. The breed, indeed, is nearly worn out: yet it may be scotched not killed, and lest it rise and be itself again, should be well watched and trampled on whenever it appears.

Shakspeare's editors may be divided into three classes. (1.) verbal critics: (2.) those who combined historical or archæological lore with philology: and (3.) those who deal with him as with a modern author, take the high à priori ground' of aesthetics, and discuss his pretensions to method, eloquence, passion, and imagination. Just forty-five years after the date of the third folio edition, appeared the first of the critical editions of Shakspeare-that by Nicholas Rowe in 1709. For a beginner, Rowe was not so bad. The rhetorical author of Jane Shore,' and the translator of 'Lucan,' brought to the task many disadvantages on the score of taste, but his hearty admiration covered a good many editorial sins. He professes to have revised and corrected Shakspeare's plays, and comparatively with his predecessors his claim may pass current. But Rowe's notions of the fitness of things in dramatic composition were drawn from the practice of Dryden and the theories of French critics. Moreover, unless he is much belied, he was an arrant tuft-hunter. Accordingly he is comforted by the knowledge that three very great men-to wit, Lord Falkland, Mr. Justice Vaughan, and Mr. Seldenconsidered Caliban a perfectly original character, for whom his creator had devised not only manners but a language also proper to himself.' He is convinced that Shakspeare was a species of Peter the wild boy among civilized playwriters. He thinks that, on the whole, we have been gainers by Shakspeare's

having small Latin and less Greek, since, if we have by his ignorance of the tongues lost some regularity of plot and much refinement of phrase, we have also gained much fire, impetuosity, and even beautiful extravagance,' which better acquaintance with Sophocles and Terence might have quenched or curbed. Rowe would evidently have liked to apply the ars topiaria to Shakspeare's forest, pollarded his oaks, and clipped his yew-trees. The second edition of his Shakspeare, 1714, was followed, eleven years afterwards, by that of Pope, in six volumes quarto, which, so far as handsome paper and good printing went, was worthy of his name. The preface, indeed, is a masterly composition, reflecting in nearly every page the good sense for which Pope was so remarkable. Agnoscit procerem,' the editor plainly feels himself in the presence of a most potent enchanter, endowed with the power of Prospero over the earth, the elements, and all their inhabitants. So just and so well expressed, indeed, are many of the opinions, that the author of them almost merits a place beside Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the best of the third division of commentators, native or foreign. Pope's unfitness for an expounder, however, appears generally in his notes and occasionally in his preface. He thought, as we know from his conversations with Spence, that Shakspeare would have been greater had he taken the tragedy of Gorboduc' for his model, and that Rowe would have written better if he had not aimed at copying Shakspeare— that is to say, he would have preferred a garden laid out according to rule before the pomp and prodigality of bountiful nature. For the dry and laborious duties of an editor Pope also was ill suited. In his version of the Homeric poems he turned over to journeymen most of the subsidiary labour; but neither Brome nor Fenton knew anything about the English drama, and so their principal was obliged to cut and bind up his own faggots. Of philology Pope was profoundly ignorant, and accordingly treated its professors with the scorn that ignorance alone can supply. He really thought Bentley to be the pedant whom he lashed, and Boyle and Aldrich the scholars whom he lauded. For a like reason, he contemned archæology in all its branches, and denounced as 'reading that was never read' the studies on which the second race of commentators plumed themselves. With such preconceptions and so much sound ignorance, the author of the Essay on Criticism' unavoidably made wild work with Shakspeare's text. He collated the printed copies, but in his corrections and suggestions was often possessed with the spirit of Harduin, who fancied that the Æneid,' and the 'Odes' and Satires' of Horace, were forgeries or rifacimentos of the