"The very lees of such, millions of rates

Exceed the wine of others."

preserva

Yet I can neither concur that other writers will not bear comparison with him, nor that if others wrote no better than his worst they would merit tion, confining the remark merely to poetry. "For out of the old fields, as men saith, Cometh all this new corn fro year to year, And out of old books, in good faith,

Cometh all this new science that men lere;"

is the language of Chaucer in his " Assembly of Foules," and if it were true at the time he wrote, how much more likely is it to be true at the time when we are speaking? But putting poetry out of the question for the moment, is there nothing else to be gained from studying our early English authors? As to our language, I am well convinced, though I may be charged with partiality, that it was never more copiously, more vigorously, or more purely written than in the age of Shakespeare. If the minds of men received an impulse from the Reformation, as Warton contends, the language, the vehicle of the mind, kept equal pace: words were then used in their original and forcible senses, and were not clipped, filed, and perverted as at the present moment, when all figurative meaning is lost in common-place application, and all marked distinction broken down and confounded. On this subject, often adverted to, I will not dwell, but

merely repeat a stanza by an old poet of the name of Arthur Golding (the translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses), which was prefixed to a dictionary printed near the middle of the reign of Elizabeth:

"No doubt but men shall shortly find there is

As perfect order, as firm certainty,

As grounded rules to try out things amiss,
As much sweet grace, as great variety
Of words and phrases, as good quantity
For verse or prose in English every way
As any common language hath this day."

Here, you see, is the opinion of a man of considerable classical attainments, living at that time, on this point; and I might quote Chapman, the translator of Homer, and various others, who have borne testimony to the fulness, strength, dignity, and beauty of their native tongue-testimony too, that to the present hour has not been contradicted. But dismissing this advantage to be derived from studying the venerable well-springs of our language, surely the history, manners, and customs of our forefathers, do not form an uninteresting or an unimportant object of inquiry, and a knowledge of them can only be derived from our elder writers*. The learned authority of Lambarde, in his Perambulation of Kent,

* If this opinion wanted confirmation, it has received it from the pen and practice of Mr. Walter Scott, who not long since edited a small reprint of a scarce volume of Satires, written about the year 1600, observing, in his preface, upon the great utility of such undertakings.

as to the knowledge to be derived from old books, I have already seen somewhere quoted.

Painter, too (subjoined Morton), in his "Palace of Pleasure," that work to which Shakespeare and several of our old dramatists were so much indebted, has a remarkable sentence on the pious necessity of preserving old books: he is speaking of Tarquin and the Sybil, "A good example (says he) for wise men to beware how they despise or neglect ancient books and monuments: many the like in this realme have been defaced, found in religious houses which no doubt would have conduced great utility and profit both to the commonwealth and country if they had been reserved and kept, which books by the ignorant have been torn and rased to the great grief of those that are learned and of those that aspire to learning and virtue."

Montaigne says (observed Elliot), la difficulté donne prix aux choses, and it is as true of books as of every thing else; because so much pains have been bestowed in raking and sifting dust and rubbish for some neglected relic, it is considered by the discoverer much more valuable than its real worth. I admit the truth of much that you have advanced, but to put it to a sort of test, let me just ask, for instance, what have the laborious commentators on Shakespeare been able to do for the poet, with all their knowledge (not to dignify it by the name of learning), of old English literature? I do not say that they have

accomplished absolutely nothing, but it is nothing compared with what might have been expected, if all you represent of the value of old books were true. It is almost a proverb in Germany, especially since the publication of the Lectures of Schlegel has shown off our illustrators to such disadvantage, that as it has pleased heaven to bestow upon England the best dramatic poet that ever lived, so, in its justice, it has endeavoured in some degree to counterbalance the benefit, by afflicting the nation with the most puerile and incompetent annotators and critics upon that poet. Scarcely one of those individuals whose names are ostentatiously appended to the comments of what is called the Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, seems to have had an idea beyond the particular word or syllable he was discussing. Yet they congratulate themselves, and belaud each other upon their fancied discoveries, with much more zeal than they bestow upon the poet. They constantly bring to one's mind Steele's shrewd remark in the Tatler, when he says that "there seems to be a general combination among the pedants to extol one another's labours, and to cry up one another's parts."

That may very fairly be charged against Dr. Johnson (said Morton), who, as if determined to go beyond all precedent in this respect, bursts out in a note on Hamlet (in reference to one of Warburton's changes), "this is a noble emendation, which almost sets the critic on a level with the author."

Though Warburton (continued Bourne) took some unwarrantable Bentleyan liberties, and was as deficient as Dr. Johnson in the kind of knowledge required for the task he undertook, he had learning and considerable ingenuity, even in his blunders. It is unfortunate that so many qualifications should be necessary for a commentator, and that so few should ever have been united in ́one individual. Steevens, "the coryphæus of annotators," as Mr. Gifford calls him, is generally considered one of the best, and yet what an uninformed mass was he-what a chaos of confused quotations and pedantic allusions, without one ray of taste to cast even a faint illumination through "the palpable obscure."

Is it not he (asked Morton), who asserted that he thought Watson as good a writer of sonnets as Shakespeare?

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The same (rejoined Bourne); adding elsewhere, I think, that the force of an act of Parliament could not compel the reading of Shakespeare's minor poems. This fact alone, without any of the other thousand proofs he has afforded, is sufficient to satisfy those who have even looked at Watson's "Exaтoμmalia, or passionate Century of Love," that Steevens had not the slightest feeling of poetry, and admired Shakespeare's plays only because he found all the world in one sentiment regarding him. Now, at the time he pronounced this absurd opinion upon his sonnets, they had been little spoken of by men of letters, and Wat