��Anecdotes by George Steevens.
��him at Garrick's.' * And what think you of his abilities?' 'They are just sufficient, Sir, to enable him to select the black hairs from the white ones, for the use of the periwig-makers. Were he and I to count the grains in a bushel of wheat for a wager, he would certainly prove the winner.'
When one Collins, a sleep-compelling divine of Herefordshire, with the assistance of Counsellor Hardinge, published a heavy half-crown pamphlet against^ Mr. Steevens r , Garrick asked the Doctor, what he thought of this attack on his coadjutor.
- I regard Collins's performance/ replied Johnson, ' as a great gun
without powder or shot.' When the same Collins afterwards appeared as editor of Capel's Posthumous Notes on Shakespeare , with a preface of his own, containing the following words, ' A sudden and most severe stroke of affliction has left my mind too much distracted to be capable [at present] of engaging in such a task (that of a further attack on Mr. Steevens), though I am prompted to it by inclination as well as duty 2 , the Doctor asked to what misfortune the foregoing words referred. Being
��dustry have never received from the public the recognition they deserved.' Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. 1891, i. Preface, pp. 37-8.
1 John Collins was in charge of the parish of Ledbury in Hereford shire. In 1777, with the assistance of George Hardinge, he published an anonymous letter in refutation of Steevens's criticisms of Capell. Capell bequeathed to him a large sum of money. Diet. Nat. Biog. xi. 371 ; xxiv. 340.
Hardinge is aimed at in the follow ing lines in Don Juan (Canto xiii. stanza 88) :
- There was the waggish Welsh
Judge, Jefferies Hardsman, In his grave office so completely
skill'd, That when a culprit came for
condemnation,
He had his judge's joke for con solation.'
��The title of the pamphlet \sA Letter to George Hardinge^ Esq., on the sub ject of a Passage in Mr. Steevens Preface to his Impressions of Shake speare. London, 1777. 4to, price three shillings. Lowndes's BibL Man. p. 2319.
2 Collins, in his Dedication to Lord Dacre (not in his Preface), accuses Steevens of ' having dressed up his volumes [of Shakespeare] throughout by appropriating to him self, without reserve, whatever suited his purpose from the present Author's edition, with which he disclaims the slightest acquaintance. Without this detail the claim of the true owner to what has been obtruded upon the Public as the property of another is left at large undecided and unas- serted.' He continues in the words quoted by Steevens, though after
- capable,' 'at present' has been
omitted.
told
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