surface, or an outgrowth bristling into notice. So that here, as in all true strength, modesty rules the transpiration. Accordingly an editor's proper art is to proceed, not by a formal and conscious use of learning, but by the silent efficacy thereof transfusing itself insensibly into and through his work, so as to accomplish its purpose without being directly seen.

Nor is Shakespeare's language so antiquated, or his idiom of thought so remote from ordinary apprehension, as to require a minute, or cumbrous, or oppressive erudition for making his thoughts intelligible to average minds. His diction, after all, is much nearer the common vernacular of the day than that of his editors: for where would these be if they did not write in a learned style? To be sure, here, as elsewhere, an editor's art, or want of art, can easily find or make ever so many difficulties, in order to magnify itself and its office by meeting them, or by seeming to meet them. And in fact it has now become, or is fast becoming, very much the fashion to treat Shakespeare in this way; an elaborate and self-conscious erudition using him as a sort of perch to flap its wings and crow from. So we have had and are having editions of his plays designed for common use, wherein the sunlight of his poetry is so muffled and strangled by a thick haze of minute, technical, and dictionary learning, that common eyes can hardly catch any fresh and clear beams of it. Small points and issues almost numberless, and many of them running clean off into distant tenth-cousin matters, are raised, as if poetry so vital and organic as his, and with its mouth so full of soul-music, were but a subject for lingual and grammatical dissection; or a thing to be studied through a microscope, and so to be "examined, ponder'd, search'd, probed, vex'd, and criticised." Is not all this very much as if the main business of readers, with Shakespeare's page before them, were to "pore, and dwindle as they pore"?

Here the ruling thought seems to be, that the chief profit

of studying Shakespeare is to come by analyzing and parsing his sentences, not by understanding and enjoying his poetry. But, assuredly, this is not the way to aid and encourage people in the study of Shakespeare. They are not to be inspired with a right love or taste for him by having his lines encumbered with such commentatorial redundances and irrelevancies. Rather say, such a course naturally renders the Poet an unmitigable bore to them, and can hardly fail to disgust and repel them; unless, perchance, it may superinduce upon them a certain dry-rot of formalistic learning. For, in a vast many cases, the explanations are far more obscure to the average reader than the things explained; and he may well despair of understanding the Poet, when he so often finds it impossible to understand his explainers. Or the effect of such a course, if it have any but a negative effect, can hardly be other than to tease and card the common sense out of people, and train them into learned and prating dunces, instead of making them intelligent, thoughtful, happy men and women in the ordinary tasks, duties, and concerns of life.

Thus Shakespeare is now in a fair way to undergo the same fate which a much greater and better book has already undergone. For even so a great many learned minds, instead of duly marking how little need be said, and how simply that little should be said, have tried, apparently, how much and how learnedly they could write upon the Bible; how many nice questions they could raise, and what elaborate comments they could weave about its contents. Take, for example, the Sermon on the Mount: left to its natural and proper working, that brief piece of writing has in it more of true culture-force or culture-inspiration than all the mere scientific books in the world put together and learned commentaries stand, or claim to stand, in the rank of scientific works. Yet even here, as experience has amply proved, a

sort of learned incontinence can easily so intricate and perplex the matter, and spin the sense out into such a curious and voluminous interpretation, as fairly to swamp plain minds, and put them quite at a loss as to what the Divine utterances mean. The thing is clear enough, until a garrulous and obtrusive learning takes it in hand; and then darkness begins to gather round it.

And so the Bible generally, as we all know, has been so worried and belaboured with erudite, or ignorant, but at all events diffusive, long-winded, and obstructive commentary; its teachings and efficacies have got so strangled by the interminable yarns of interpretation spun about them; that now at length common people have pretty much lost both their faith in it and their taste for it: reverence for it has come to be regarded as little better than an exploded superstition and indeed its light can hardly struggle or filtrate through the dense vapours of learned and elaborate verbosity exhaled from subjacent regions. The tendency now is to replace the Bible with Shakespeare as our master-code of practical wisdom and guidance. I am far, very far indeed, from regarding this as a sign of progress, either moral or intellectual: viewed merely in reference to literary taste, the Bible is incomparably beyond any other book in the world : but, if such a substitution must be made, Shakespeare is probably the best. The Poet himself tells us, "they that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton.” And so, to be sure, the process has set in, and is already well advanced, of smothering his proper light beneath commentatorial surplusage and rubbish.

So strong is the conceit of studying all things scientifically, that we must, forsooth, have Shakespeare used as the raw material of scientific manufacture. It seems to be presumed that people cannot rightly feed upon his poetry, unless it be first digested for them into systematic shape by passing

But the plain

through some gerund-grinding laboratory. truth is, that works of imagination cannot be mechanized and done over into the forms of science, without a total dissipation of their life and spirit, of all indeed that is properly constitutive in them. It is simply like dissecting a bird in order to find out where the music comes from and how it is made.

I have, perhaps, dwelt upon this topic too long, and may fitly close it with a few pertinent words from Bacon, which always come into my remembrance when thinking on the subject. "The first distemper of learning," says he, "is when men study words and not matter. And how is it possible but this should have an operation to discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, when they see learned men's works like the first letter of a patent, or a limnèd book; which, though it hath large flourishes, yet is but a letter? It seems to me that Pygmalion's frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity: for words are but the images of matter; and, except they have the life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture." In another passage, he puts the matter as follows: "Surely, like as many substances in Nature which are solid do putrefy and corrupt into worms; so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to putrefy and dissolve into a number of subtile, idle, unwholesome, and (as I may term them) vermiculate questions, which have indeed a kind of quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality."

To preclude misapprehension, as far as may be, I must add that the foregoing remarks have an eye only to editions of the Poet designed for common use; and so cannot be justly construed as reflecting on such as look mainly to the special use of students and scholars. Doubtless there may be, nay, there must be, from time to time, say as often as

once in forty or fifty years, highly learned editions of Shakespeare; such, for instance, as Mr. Howard Furness's magnificent Variorum, which, so far as it has come, is a truly monumental achievement of learning, judgment, good sense, and conscientious, painstaking industry. Of course such a work must needs enter very largely into the details and processes of the subject, pursuing a great many points out through all the subtilties and intricacies of critical inquiry. But, for the generality of readers, such a handling of the theme is obviously quite out of the question: in this hard working-day world, they have too much else in hand to be tracing out and sifting the nice questions which it is the business of a profound and varied scholarship to investigate and settle; and the last and highest results of such scholarship is all that they can possibly have time or taste for. If any one says that common readers, such as at least ninetynine persons in a hundred are and must be, should have the details and processes of the work put before them, that so they may be enabled to form independent judgments for themselves ; - I say, whoever talks in this way is either under a delusion himself, or else means to delude others. It may flatter common readers to be told that they are just as competent to judge for themselves in these matters as those are who have made a lifelong study of them: but the plain truth is, that such readers must perforce either take the results of deep scholarship on trust, or else not have them at all; and none but a dupe or a quack, or perhaps a compound of the two, would ever think of representing the matter otherwise.

But the main business of this Preface is yet to come, and what remains must be chiefly occupied with certain questions touching the Poet's text. And here I must first make a brief general statement of the condition in which his text has