Mrs. Oliphant. 'What does he want Kate's letter to Holden and the from me?' artist's reply, which broke off the 'Well, to change the subject to affair for the present. a more important one to myself,' he resumed, what would you say if I ask Miss Oliphant to be Lady Stainmore?' Mrs. Oliphant's face brightened. If this was all, she was ready enough, heaven knows, to help him without any pressure. 'Really, Lord Stainmore-you take one so by surprise. I had no notion of this,' she replied with sufficient delight in her tone; 'but so far as I am concerned, I can only say that I should consider such a match a very great honour to us.' 'Thank you, Mrs. Oliphant; I felt somehow from the first that I might count on you-one has a sort of instinctive knowledge of friends and enemies in matters on which one sets one's heart. But besides your sanction, for which I can assure you I am very grateful, I want a little help from you, if you would be so kind.' 'Help in what way, my lord?' 'Well, I have observed Miss Oliphant rather attentively, as under the circumstances you will imagine; and I may say without vanity that, though she is no ordinary girl, I think I should succeed in my addresses if she has formed no prior attachment. But what I have seen of her leads me to believe she has. Am I right?' 'I-I fear you are.' 'You fear it! Then it is some one, I suppose, of whom you disapprove? It is certainly not Highside-she laughs at him; nor Fothergill, for whom she has too open a friendship to lead to anything further. May I venture to ask who it is?-You very properly hesitate to answer such a question; but shall I help you with a guess?is it the young artist of whom I have heard so much?' And little by little he forced her to explain exactly how the matter stood, including 'So you see, my lord,' she continued, there is no actual engagement now, and there is nothing to prevent your speaking to her.' 'You will excuse my differing from you on this one point, Mrs. Oliphant, but if I understand your daughter's character she will be perfectly faithful till Holden acquaints Mr. Oliphant; and there is not much fear of the painter turning inconstant while there's a chance left, poor devil!--begging your pardon for the word.' 'No, no; I agree with you there thoroughly-the viper! Then do you mean to proceed no further with your own suit?' 'Ah, I do not say that: I do not give up my wishes quite so easily. But it is one of my maxims, as a man of the world, not to start my horses till the course is clear. And till then, if I know Miss Oliphant at all, there is not even a chance of the ribbon.' "You mean 'I mean only, my dear Mrs. Oliphant, that if anything should unfortunately happen to Mr. Holden' (there was a sinister flash of the black eyes, which made Mrs. Oliphant shudder, she could hardly tell why), 'or if he were ass enough to fall in love with some one else 'Impossible, Lord Stainmore! Insolent as he is, the young man would never dare to do it.' 'No, I do not expect that; but many things may happen, and then I should come forward, I hope after a time with a fair chance.' 'Well, perhaps I ought scarcely to say as much to you, but I shall leave no stone unturned to break off this unhappy affair; and you may be quite sure whose cause I shall then advocate.' 'Thank you very much,' answered the other, but rather carelessly, as if the promise were no more than he expected: 'I must go south in a day or two.' 'So soon, my lord?' 'I have had a very pleasant and a long visit, but I have some business to do before I start for the Continent. I think of spending two or three months in Italy this winter.' What suspicion was it that flashed across Mrs. Oliphant's mind at the name, and that made her so pale? What he said, he said in the pleasantest and most kindly voice in the world. 'Oh, and—and as we have now a common interest in the matter, perhaps you would let me know from time to time where this young fellow is? It is just possible we might happen to be in the same place at the same time, and, if so, I should very much like to see this victorious Paladin of the brush.' 'I will let you know, my lord,' she said, in a faint low voice; and he turned the conversation to other topics. A day or two afterwards he took his leave, with many thanks to Mr. Oliphant both for his hospitality. and his valuable hints on the proper management of estates. He was accompanied by numerous regrets, from Kate included, who was delighted however that some one lately at Reinsber might possibly see her dear Frank in Italy. Lord Stainmore seemed a most agreeable. link of communication between the two places. TH SHAKESPEARE'S VOCABULARY AND STYLE. HE years that have elapsed since Shakespeare's birth represent with tolerable exactness the number of editions through which his works have passed. He was born just three hundred and five years ago, and if the separate issues of his dramatic works on the shelves of the British Museum were distributed, one might be assigned to each year. Not of course that they appeared in anything like this order, no edition at all having been published till seven years after Shakespeare's death, while the great majority belong to the last half-century. In the century immediately after the poet's death only five editions were issued, the four folios, and the first critical edition published in the more convenient octavo form, and care- speare increase every year, and he fully edited by Rowe. To the next is the one author of the same date century belong the well-known whose fame grows with the growth critical editions of Pope, Theobald, of popular intelligence, and the Johnson, Hanmer, Capel, Steevens advancing desire amongst large and Malone, besides many others classes of hard-working Englishmen of the simple text. In our own day for some degree of mental cultivathe improvements in the art of tion. The prophecy of a contemprinting, and the facilities for the porary critic, that every page of production and diffusion of cheap Shakespeare's wit-fraught book literature, have rapidly multiplied would be prized by posterity, and the issues until they have reached help to keep his name fresh and the large number of more than green, and give a golden lustre to three hundred. It may be ques- his reputation in each succeeding tioned whether the works of any age, is thus fulfilled. He still remodern poet have gone through mains the dear son of memory as an equal number of editions. The well as the great heir of fame. He 'Divine Comedy' has passed is the one English poet who, in addithrough about three hundred edi- tion to having a great name, the tions, but it must be remembered greatest in all literature, is still read that the birth of Dante goes back for his own sake by countless numsix hundred years instead of three. bers, who care nothing about the And taking the dates for compari- literary standing of an author, who son from the invention of printing return again and again to his pages and the first publication of Shake- simply for the varied stimulus and speare's collected works, the most enjoyment their perusal affords, that can be said is, that Dante's and who in this way have come to great poem has gone through nearly regard them as a storehouse of an equal number of editions in about inexhaustible materials for the double the time. illumination and vital quickening of These facts would seem to be the intellect, the imagination, and decisive as to Shakespeare's popularity in the best sense, the permanent and ever-increasing interest his dramas possess for large classes of intelligent readers. Unless he were really a favourite author, numerous editions of his works. would not follow each other in such rapid succession. The dramas of his most distinguished contemporaries, such as Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and Ford-some of them ranked by early critics as equal, if not superior, to Shakespeare-have been reprinted at most only about half-a-dozen times, and are rarely looked into at all, except by professional students of English literature. But the editions of Shake the affections. The fact that he retains this kind of hold on intelligent English readers of all classes would seem also to go far towards settling the disputed question as to Shakespeare's style and phraseology. If his dramas still attract and charm the widest circle of readers on both sides of the Atlantic, and are in reality the most popular poems in the language, it seems a fair, if not a necessary inference, that they must in the main be written in a clear and intelligible style. But this is precisely the claim that was most persistently denied by the critics and arbiters of literary taste and judgment for nearly a hundred years. Extreme obscurity of phrase and diction is one of the two great charges urged against Shakespeare by the critics of the Restoration and of the early decades of the eighteenth century, the other charge being ignorance of dramatic art, and the constant violation of its mechanical rules and conventional proprieties. Under the dominant influence of French and classical critical theories of the most narrow and artificial kind, the charge of ignorance survived that of obscurity, being repeated at intervals during the whole of the last century, and lasting almost on to our own day, until it was finally exploded by the modern school of criticism headed by Coleridge. But in the earlier period of the Restoration the accusation of extreme rudeness of phrase and unintelligible barbarousness of diction is the one most constantly reiterated. By critics of this period Shakespeare's writing is said to be full of obsolete words and phrases, dark conceits, strained metaphors, and bombastic extravagance. That the ordinary critics and playwrights of the period should have characterised Shakespeare's style in this way is not surprising. The comic drama of the Restoration, its whole poetical art, indeed, were so identified with superficial wit, conventional manners, and mere social intrigue, that its authors could hardly be expected to appreciate or even to understand the language of real passion, or the conceptions of creative imagination in which it is embodied and expressed. They were ignorant, too, of the romantic drama and the great school of Elizabethan poetry. Dryden, indeed, knew something of this school, and might therefore be fairly expected to form a judgment of Shakespeare different from that of his more frivolous and ignorant contemporaries. In his calmer and more deliberate estimate of Shakespeare, Dryden justifies this expec tation; but in defending himself against contemporary censure he stigmatises the rudeness and obscurity of Shakespeare's phraseology in terms almost as extreme as those of the mole-eyed Rhymer, the most helpless and benighted of all critical pedants. He says, for example:Let any man who understands English read diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw of sense.' He adds of the historical plays generally, and four of the comedies which he specifies, 'they are either grounded on impossibilities, or at least so meanly written, that the comedies neither command your mirth, nor the serious parts your concernment.' Again, in the same essay, he says:- Shakespeare writes in many places below the dullest authors of our or of any preceding age; never did any writer precipitate himself from such heights of thought to so low expres sions as he often does. He is the very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere two faces; you have scarce begun to admire the one ere you despise the other.' Again, in the preface to his altered edition of Troilus and Cressida :-'It will be allowed to the present age, that the language in general is so much refined since Shakespeare's time, that many of his words, and more of his phrases, are scarce intelligible, and of those which we understand some are ungrammatical, others coarse, and his whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure.' And after intimating that Troilus, which he erroneously regarded as one of the earliest instead of one of the latest of Shakespeare's plays, contains some of the worst specimens of these vices, he adds:'Yet because the play was Shakespeare's I undertook to remove the heap of rubbish under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly buried. . . . I need not say I have improved the language which before was obsolete.' It must in fairness, however, be allowed that there was at least some excuse for the way in which Dryden speaks of Shakespeare's language, in the state of the existing text of his works, and the total absence of all verbal and illustrative criticism. The only text known in Dryden's day, that of the folios, is corrupt in every part, and beyond the recasting of a few plays by Davenant and others, no attempt at correcting it had as yet been made. Many passages, moreover, were obscure from their allusions to forgotten habits and usages, and from embodying phrases and modes of speech peculiar to a past age. There was abundant scope, therefore, for verbal criticism, and this obvious want soon stimulated the minute, but useful, industry of the whole tribe of black letter critics and expositors. As the result of their labours a large number of the more obvious errors in the folio text were corrected, conjectural emendations, more or less sagacious, were suggested for passages that remained hopelessly corrupt, and a number of difficulties arising from obscure allusions were thoroughly cleared up. A vast body of materials for illustrating the text of Shakespeare was in this way gradually accumulated, the more valuable portions of which are collected and republished in the ordinary variorum editions. Many of the obscurities of phrase and diction which had perplexed Dryden were removed by the persistent labours of the two great schools of Shakespearian critics the eighteenth century produced. In the second half of the century, moreover, the neglected literature of the Elizabethan era began to be studied with zeal and intelligence, and the chief barrier to the more perfect understanding of Shakespeare was in this way gradually broken down. Looked at in the light of the rich and varied contemporary literature of that period, what had seemed strange and unnatural to the shallow critics of the Restoration became not only perfectly intelligible, but was found to be the reflex of deeper imaginative insight, wider and more subtle thought, more complex and profound emotion. By the end of the eighteenth century little more was heard of Shakespeare's barbarous style and obsolete phraseology. The old charge of obscurity had indeed fallen so completely into abeyance as hardly to merit serious notice, but for its revival by a literary historian whose words are usually weighed with care, and whose deliberate opinion on any such question is at least entitled to respectful consideration. It need hardly be said to intelligent readers of Mr. Hallam's Introduction to the Literature of Europe, that his criticisms, if somewhat cold and measured in their tone, are, as a rule, sagacious, discriminating, and just. He sums up the merits and defects of great thinkers and poets with a kind of judicial impartiality not common in literary criticism, and which must be at times a little trying to their more enthusiastic |