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��NOTES BY THE WAY.
��Singer's ' Shake- speare.'
��Mrs. Fitz- herbert and George IV.
��Victor Hugo.
��Coventry Putin ore.
��" Portions of his vast subject will hereafter receive additional inquiry, and be placed in a new and fuller light, and his thoughts will fructify and expand in the minds of other men ; but it will be long before the work, as a whole, can be superseded, and his history will remain to many generations as a monument of learning, of wisdom, and of penetration."
On the same date a review of Singer's ' Shakespeare ' states :
" It is not creditable to English men of letters that a satisfactory edition of England's greatest poet should still be a desideratum ; yet every student must admit the mortifying fact. . . .There are many causes of the many failures the principal cause, however, and that which brings all the others in its train, is the mediocrity of the men who have undertaken the task. Even in the case of Johnson, Pope, and Campbell, this sweeping charge of mediocrity is applicable, for these men, remarkable as they were, were but mediocre in their knowledge of Elizabethan literature and of the dramatic art. No dramatist has ever set himself to the task no man of special knowledge and great intellectual power has thought it worthy of his labours, or thought himself competent to undertake it. The difficulties we admit to be very great. It is indispensable that whoever engages in the work should be familiar with much more than the Elizabethan literature. He must know the Spanish drama, and the early drama of France and Italy, and he must be a dramatic critic."
The subject of Mrs. Fitzherbert and George IV. has been revived through the publication in 1905 of the work by Mr. W. H. Wilkins. The Saturday Review of the 29th of March, 1856, notices the memoirs of the Hon. Charles Langdale, who had set his heart upon the production of the papers deposited at Coutts's, to which Mr. Wilkins, by permission of King Edward, has had access. Mrs. Fitzherbert's executors, Sir George Seymour and Mr. Forster, objected : " They urged that those papers only proved the marriage of Mrs. Fitzherbert with the Prince a thing which for many years, past has never been disputed." In the book appear the letters from the Duke of Wellington to Lord Stourton, refusing his consent to the publication of the papers contained in the packet :
" I do protest most solemnly against the measure proposed by your Lordship that of breaking the seals affixed to the packet of papers belonging to the late Mrs. Fitzherbert, deposited at Messrs. Coutts the bankers', under the several seals of the Earl of Albemarle, your Lordship, and myself."
Victor Hugo's ' Les Contemplations ' receives high eulogy in the number for the 26th of June :
" We owe a debt of unmixed gratitude to the exile at Guernsey for the rich banquet of poetry of which it has been our privilege to partake. That we are not singular in our opinion as to its worth, may be gathered from the fact that the first edition of the ' Contemplations ' was ex- hausted on the day of publication."
In the review of ' The Angel in the House ' on the llth of October, Coventry Patmore is recognized as " a true poet," The
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