Page:Life of Edmond Malone.djvu/214

which you justly remarked in it, and which I fairly believe neither Milton nor the young man had before the gutta serena was confirmed. Perhaps what I have said may induce you to speak to Dr. Burney on the subject, who if you wish it, would easily give you an opportunity of seeing the person I have mentioned.

I have for many years neglected to examine the various editions of Shakspeare which have been published since Warburton's. I must therefore take shame to myself when I own that I have not seen more of your edition than a great turning over some of its volumes has given me, which, however, has convinced me that you have taken such minute, accurate, and laudable pains in restoring the text, that I think you might well have spared the trouble of taking notice of so poor an antagonist as you have in the pamphlet you have done me the honour to send, and to whom I think you have given more than ample confutation.

I guess him to be the same person who a few years ago treated the late Mr. T. Warton with the same sort of scurrility, but I neither knew nor wish to know his name. I should (were I you) have contented myself with calling him in Shakspearian phrase—

A captious and unteemable sieve (illegible).

But here, you see, I adopt a reading which you have discarded for this reason. To teem or team (I know not which is the right spelling) is a northern verb used for pouring one thing through another, or into another. That species of sieve or (illegible) which separates flour from bran is with us called a temze. Hence, therefore, the word might be altered to untemzible, a sieve which will let nothing pass through it; and though I cannot, in All's Well that Ends Well, find the passage, and therefore am ignorant of the context; yet the epithet captious leads me to think that Shakspeare meant to say that the person spoken to was so captious that he would let nothing pass, like a sieve of too close a fabric or texture. I by no means, however, wish you to adopt either of these readings in your next editions, lest they should be laid to the charge of that Mr. Mason, some of whose notes you have