monks. Passage after passage he struck out, and many acts and scenes he modified or gave up in despair on the supposition that either the players had foisted them in, or that the transcribers had seen double at their work. He was at once the young wife and the old wife of the good man in Esop, and the unshorn Apollo of the stage came out of the process somewhat in the condition of a slave about to receive his freedom. The editorial transgressions of Pope were perceived and timely arrested-and such was Pope's predominance in the realm of literature that when he spoke most men said it was the voice of an oracle-by a man whom he originally seated on the throne of Duncedom, though he afterwards caused Cibber to reign in his stead. Lewis Theobald owed his elevation to that dull eminence to a Tract which he published in 1726, entitled Shakspeare Restored; or, Specimens of Blunders committed and unamended in Pope's edition of this Poet.' Here was 'flat burglary.' Here was an arrow flying in darkness, (for who was this Theobald so to speak against the king?) and hitting Achilles in the heel. Let swift justice be done on this Pandarus, and so two years after the date of the pamphlet Pope writes 'High on a gorgeous seat, that far outshone Henley's gilt tub, or Flecknoe's Irish throne, And hence, and yet more incensed by an edition of the poet published by the same offender in 1733, the touchy satirist dubbed his censor for ever with the title of Piddling Tibbalds' -the surname providentially rhyming to'ribbalds.' Theobald had the hide of a rhinoceros to oppose to satire, and a fair ballast of good sense to keep him steady. Bravely as Bentley himself he stood against the pelting of the storm. His reward was hardly delayed. Not only did contemporaries prefer his edition to Pope's, but posterity has confirmed their verdict, and even now, more than a century after his curæ priores were sent to the press, Theobald stands, for occasional happiness in emendation, and for general sobriety in dealing with the text of Shakspeare, among the best of annotators. Theobald, however, was in one respect less fortunate than Hercules: 'Diram qui contudit Hydram, Comperit invidiam supremo fine domari.' Pope's arrows long cleaved to his buckler; and he has been fancied a blockhead on no better authority than that of a stinging couplet or two 'Rupit Iarbitam Timagenis æmula lingua.' Even Samuel Johnson, though he seldom followed a leader, much undervalued Theobald; yet once, whether compelled by the truth, or forgetting his preceding censure, he fairly stated his merits. Pope,' he writes, was succeeded by Theobald, a man of narrow comprehension and small acquisitions, with no native and intrinsic splendour of genius, with little of the artificial light of learning, but zealous for minute accuracy, and not negligent in pursuing it. He collated the ancient copies and rectified many errors. A man so anxiously scrupulous might have been expected to do more, but what little he did was commonly right." This dubious and extorted praise resembles Launce's dubitations about the gifts of his future wife. Stop there I'll have her: she was mine and not mine, twice or thrice in that last article: Rehearse that once more.' What cardinal virtues, on Johnson's own showing, did this man of narrow comprehension and small acquisitions' lack for the task he took in hand? He did not aspire to the weightier matters of Shakspearian criticism: he did not write silly books about it, like Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, Mrs. Montagu, or Professor Richardson. If he were, as his enemies asserted, the antichrist of wit,' he did not 'sit the arbiter of wit,' but he set himself to correct verbal and typographical blunders, derived from the folios and quartos, and overlooked or multiplied by incompetent editors. What he did was well done. 'It was," Mr. Charles Knight justly observes, because Theobald was "anxiously scrupulous," because he did not attempt "to do more" than an editor ought to do, that he had the public support.' The rules which Theobald imposed on himself as an editor are so universally wholesome, that we transcribe them for the use of editors and annotators in general. The laws which Porson laid down for his own conduct in revising the text of Euripides are more elegantly and forcibly expressed, but not more germane to the matter. 'Wherever,' says Theobald in his Preface, the author's sense is clear and discoverable (though perchance low and trivial), I have not by any innovation tampered with his text out of an ostentation to make him speak better than the old copies have done. 'Where, through all the former editions, a passage has laboured under flat nonsense and invincible darkness, if by the addition or alteration of a letter or two, or a transposition in the pointing, I have restored to him both sense and sentiment, such corrections, I am persuaded, will need no indulgence. 'And, wherever I have taken a greater latitude and liberty in amending, I have constantly endeavoured to support my corrections and conjectures by parallel passages and authorities from himself, the surest means of expounding any author whatsoever.' Si sic omnes, had succeeding editors of Shakspeare adhered to these golden rules, it would not have been left to Mr. Dyce to furnish an eclectic text' of the poet. There now remains little to detain us from the second order of Shakspearian commentators. Hanmer's splendid edition in six volumes, quarto, printed at the Oxford University Press in 1744, added nothing to Theobald's, and when he deviated from it the baronet was generally wrong. Warburton, occasionally happy as a corrector, was so exceedingly ingenious that he ascribes meanings to the sound-minded Shakspeare that might be tolerable in the 'Divine Legation,' and nowhere else. Johnson, though in his Dictionary he had 'circumnavigated the globe of the English language,' was very imperfectly acquainted with Elizabethan literature; and, as his 'Irene' proves, believed that it was the province of tragedy to preach to the understanding, rather than to purify the affections or exalt the imagination. To invert his own phrase recently cited, he 'did but little and that little was not done well.' 6 In the Pursuits of Literature '-a poem now nearly forgotten, but once regarded with almost as much admiration as the 'Satires' of Juvenal, and nearly as much awe as The Dunciad '-Shakspeare and his commentators are represented under the figure of Actæon torn by his own hounds. As this spirited hunting-piece contains a nearly complete list of Shakspearian critics in the last century, and a tolerable estimate of their several qualities, we transcribe it as an introduction to a further dissection of them : 'Must I for Shakspeare no compassion feel, All well broke-in by coney-catching art. Hark! Johnson smacks his lash: loud sounds the din; Rich with the spoils of learning's black domain, Fierce, meagre, pale, no commentator's friend; With Labros Percy barks in close pursuit ; I wished not to be in at Shakspeare's death.'1 Some of the pack were good dogs enough in every respect, except as regarded Actæon. The name of Percy should never be mentioned without an act of inward homage to one of the foremost reformers of taste in English literature. His 'Reliques of Ancient Poetry' paved the way for the reception of Wordsworth, by accustoming readers to the simple grandeur of the ballad, and to the pure and nervous language of poets who write without the fear of criticism, and in complete ignorance of the ceremonial law of Aristotle and Boileau. His collection of 'such ballads as are quoted by Shakspeare, or contribute in any way to illustrate his writings,' displays industry, good taste, and loyalty; and his well-known cento of innumerable little fragments of ancient songs,' dispersed through Shakspeare's plays, As the points of this description are scarcely intelligible apart from the passage which it parodies, we subjoin the original verses (Ovid. Metamorph. iii., 206-224). The quadruped, it will be seen, are more numerous than the biped hounds 'Dum dubitat, videre canes: primusque Melampus, Pamphagus, et Dorceus, et Oribasus; Arcades omnes; Deque lupo concepta Nape, pecudesque secuta, Et Dromas et Canace, Sticteque et Tigris et Alce, Et Thous, et Cypriò velox cum fratre Lycisce, Harpalos, et Melaneus, hirsutaque corpore Lachne; Et patre Dictao, sed matre Laconide nati, Labros et Agriodos, et acutæ vocis Hylactor.' And since we have taken the privilege of a note, it may be as well to add that the rather enigmatic line, as it stands above, 'Who never stood aghast in speechless trance,' is an allusion to the line in Gray's Bard: 'Stout Gloucester stood aghast in speechless trance,' Gloucester being in the satirical verse-Warburton. shows no prentice-hand in the art of poetry. He writes cautiously about his favourite themes, and was indeed a good deal bullied by Johnson and his friends on their account; but it is clear, whenever he speaks of the great dramatic poet, that he held nobler and juster conceptions of him than many who wrote with more confidence, and arrogated the patronage of Shakspeare. It is ever to be lamented that Walter Whiter should have strayed into the wide regions of etymology, and deserted his proper domain as an illustrator of Shakspeare. He was an excellent classical scholar, even by Porson's admission, and he was not wont to throw compliments away. Porson's opinion of Whiter as a Grecian is curtly recorded in his brief preface to an edition of Xenophon's 'Anabasis,' and it is justified by several scholarly papers on Greek literature contributed by Whiter to the old Monthly Review.' But he was still better acquainted with the dramatic literature of his own country. The Pursuer of Literature' notices Whiter's independent track as a commentator, though his metaphor of the dog at fault' is not a happy one. Dorceus did not hunt with the pack, but he was often on the right scent when the noisier hounds had lost it. His 'Specimen of a Commentary on Shakspeare,' though it winds up with a strange craze about the authenticity of Rowley's poems, is a sound and shrewd book, full of curious lore and ingenious suggestions. Tyrwhitt, again, was an excellent Greek scholar, as well as the first good editor of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.' Warton was himself no ordinary poet, a genial critic on Spenser, paulo iniquior to Milton, whom he mistook for a peevish Puritan, and, considering how little was then done to his hand, he had really a marvellous acquaintance with archæology in all its branches. That Johnson was a mighty hunter no one will deny; but his game lay in other than Shakspearian fields. But no one of these was reckoned in his day a leader in the chase. That distinction was claimed by Farmer and Steevens-by Farmer, as having convicted the poet of unusual ignorance; by Steevens, as having 'polished his versification.' As specimens of what was in those days considered as the proper metal for editors and annotators on Shakspeare, it may be worth while to scan more closely the pretensions of this pair of worthies. Farmer, then, was esteemed, and perhaps he really was, the most profound black-letter scholar of his time. He read such books alone as every one else had ceased to read; and on the first token or glimpse of resemblance in the turn of a thought or phrase, he was down upon Shakspeare with a charge of petty larceny. Were Farmer's doctrine true, the author of the noblest dramas in the world had not merely small Latin and no Greek, but a |