pleases, with his author's language and metre. It was not, therefore, without cause that Steevens held his labours in much estimation. Malone was an invaluable collector of facts: his industry was indefatigable: his researches were deep: his pursuit of truth was sincere and ardent: but he wanted the talents and the taste of a critic; and of all the editors, by whom Shakspeare has suffered, I must consider him as the most perniciNeither the indulged fancy of Pope, nor the fondness for innovation in Hanmer, nor the arrogant and headlong self-confidence of Warburton has inflicted such cruel wounds on the text of Shakspeare, as the assuming dulness of Malone. Barbarism and broken rhythm dog him at the heels wherever he treads.

ous.

In praise of the third and the fourth folio editions of our author's dramas, printed respectively in 1664 and 1685, nothing can be advanced. Each of these editions implicitly followed its immediate predecessor, and, adopting all its errors, increased them to a frightful accumulation with its own. With the text of Shakspeare in this disorder, the public of Britain remained satisfied during many years. From the period of his death he had not enforced that popularity to which his title was undeniable. Great, though inferior, men, Jonson, Fletcher, Massinger, Shirley, Ford, &c. got possession of the stage, and retained it till it ceased to exist under the puritan domination. On the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the theatre indeed was again opened; but, under the influence of the vicious taste of the new monarch, it was surrendered to a new school (the French school) of the drama; and its mastery was held by Dryden, with many subordinates, during a long succession of years. Throughout this whole period, Shakspeare was nearly forgotten by his ungrateful or blinded countrymen. His splendor, it is true, was gleaming above the horizon; and his glory, resting in purple and gold upon the hill-summits, obtained the homage of a select band of his worshippers: but it was still hidden from the eyes of the multitude; and it was long before it gained its "meridian tower," whence it was to throw its "glitter

ing shafts" over a large portion of the earth. At length, about the commencement of the last century, Britain began to open her eyes to the excellency of her illustrious son, THE GREAT POET OF NATURE, and to discover a solicitude for the integrity of his works. A new and a more perfect edition of them became the demand of the public; and, to answer it, an edition, under the superintendence of Rowe, made its appearance in 1709. Rowe, however, either forgetting or shrinking from the high and laborious duties, which he had undertaken, selected, most unfortunately, for his model, the last and the worst of the folio editions; and, without collating either of the first two folios or any of the earlier quartos, he gave to the disappointed public a transcript much too exact of the impure text which lay opened before him. Some of its grosser errors, however, he corrected; and he prefixed to his edition a short memoir of the life of his author; which, meagre and weakly written as it is, still constitutes the most authentic biography that we possess of our mighty bard.

On the failure of this edition, after the pause of a few years, another was projected; and that it might be more adequate to the claims of Shakspeare and of Britain, the conduct of it was placed, in homage to his just celebrity, in the hands of Pope. Pope showed himself more conscious of the nature of his task, and more faithful in his execution of it than his predecessor. He disclosed to the public the very faulty state of his author's text, and suggested the proper means of restoring it: he collated many of the earlier editions, and he cleared the page of Shakspeare from many of its deformities: but his collations were not sufficiently extensive; and he indulged, perhaps, somewhat too much in conjectural emendation. This exposed him to the attacks of the petty and minute critics; and, the success of his work falling short of his expectations, he is said to have contracted that enmity to verbal criticism, which actuated him during the remaining days of his life. His edition was published in the year 1725. Before this was undertaken, Theobald, a man of no great abilities and of little

learning, had projected the restoration of Shakspeare: but his labours had been suspended, or their result had been withheld from the press, till the issue of Pope's attempt was ascertained by its accomplishment, and publication. The Shakspeare of Theobald's editing was not given to the world before the year 1733; when it obtained more of the public regard than its illustrious predecessor, in consequence of its being drawn from a somewhat wider field of collation; and of its less frequent and presumptuous admission of conjecture. Theobald, indeed, did not wholly abstain from conjecture: but the palm of conjectural criticism was placed much too high for the reach of his hand.

To Theobald, as an editor of Shakspeare, succeeded Sir Thomas Hanmer, who, in 1744, published a superb edition of the great dramatist from the press of Oxford. But Hanmer, building his work on that of Pope, and indulging in the wildest and most wanton innovations, deprived his edition of all pretensions to authenticity and consequently to merit.

The bow of Ulysses was next seized by a mighty hand-by the hand of Warburton; whose Shakspeare was published in 1747. It failed of success; for, conceiving that the editor intended to make his author his showman to exhibit his erudition and intellectual power, the public quickly neglected his work; and it soon disappeared from circulation, though some of its proffered substitutions must be allowed to be happy, and some of its explanations to be just.

After an interval of eighteen years, Shakspeare obtained once more an editor of great name, and seemingly in every way accomplished to assert the rights of his author. In 1765 Doctor Samuel Johnson presented the world with his long-promised edition of our dramatist: and the public expectation, which had been highly raised, was again doomed to be disappointed. Johnson had a powerful intellect, and was perfectly conversant with human life: but he was not sufficiently versed in black-letter lore; and, deficient in poetic taste, he was unable to accompany our great bard in the higher flights

of his imagination. The public in general were not satisfied with his commentary or his text: but to his preface they gave the most unlimited applause. The array and glitter of its words; the regular and pompous march of its periods, with its pervading affectation of deep thought and of sententious remark, seem to have fascinated the popular mind; and to have withdrawn from the common observation its occasional poverty of meaning; the inconsistency of its praise and censure; the falsity in some instances of its critical remarks; and its defects now and then even with respect to composition. It has, however, its merits, and Heaven forbid that I should not be just to them. It gives a right view of the difficulties to be encountered by the editor of Shakspeare: it speaks modestly of himself, and candidly of those who had preceded him in the path which he was treading: it assigns to Pope, Hanmer, and Warburton, those victims to the rage of the minute critics, their due proportion of praise: it is honorably just, in short, to all, who come within the scope of its observations, with the exception of the editor's great author alone. To him also the editor gives abundant praise; but against it he arrays such a frightful host of censure as to command the field; and to leave us to wonder at our admiration of an object so little worthy of it, though he has been followed by the admiration of more than two entire centuries. But Johnson was of a detracting and derogating spirit. He looked at mediocrity with kindness: but of proud superiority he was impatient; and he always seemed pleased to bring down the man of the etherial soul to the mortal of mere clay. His maxim seems evidently to have been that, which was recommended by the Roman poet to his countrymen,

"Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos."

In the preeminence of intellect, when it was immediately in his view, there was something which excited his spleen; and he exulted in its abasement. In his page," Shakspeare, in his comic scenes, is seldom successful when he engages his characters in reciprocations

of smartness and contests of sarcasm: their jests are commonly gross, and their pleasantry licentious. In tragedy, his performance seems to be constantly worse as his labour is more. The effusions of passion, which exigence forces out, are, for the most part, striking and energetic: but whenever he solicits his invention or strains his faculties, the offspring of his throes is tumour, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity! In narration he affects a disproportionate pomp of diction, and a wearisome train of circumlocution, &c. &c. His declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak, for his power was the power of Nature! when he endeavoured, like other tragic writers, to catch opportunities of amplification; and, instead of inquiring what the occasion demanded, to show how much his stores of knowledge could supply, he seldom escapes without the pity or resentment of his reader?" "But the admirers of this great poet have never less reason to indulge their hopes of supreme excellence, than when he seems fully resolved to sink them in dejection, and mollify them with tender emotions by the fall of greatness, the danger of innocence, or the crosses of love. He is not long soft and pathetic without some idle conceit or contemptible equivocation. He no sooner moves than he counteracts himself; and terror and pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted with sudden frigidity!" The egregious editor and critic then proceeds to confound his author with his last and most serious charge, that of an irreclaimable attachment to the offense of verbal conceit. This charge the editor illustrates and enforces, to excite our attention and to make an irresistible assault on our assent, with a variety of figurative and magnificent allusion. First, a quibble is to Shakspeare, what luminous vapours (a Will o' the wisp) are to travellers: he follows it at all adventures: it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to ingulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible," &c. It then becomes a partridge or a pheasant; for "whatever be the dignity or the profundity

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