Magazine; these papers became the germ of a more comprehensive survey of the matter in question; other, previously written but unpublished essays, on some of Shakspeare's Characters, were added to the collection; and the amalgam of these miscellanies is presented to the world in the volume yclept "Shakespeare's Scholar."
The Scholar's hate of peddling emendators is that of a thorough good hater. Every pulse of his being beats time and keeps tune with the lament of Mathias:
Must I for Shakespeare no compassion feel,
Almost eat up by Commentating zeal?
On Avon's banks I heard Actæon mourn,
By fell Black Letter Dogs in pieces torn;
Dogs that from Gothic kennels eager start
All well broke-in by Coney-catching Art—
*********Hot was the chase; I left it out of breath;
I wish'd not to be in at Shakespeare's death.
Not merely is Mr. White impatient of the Beckets and laureat Pyes, and nibbling rats and mice and such small deer, which have been his mirth for seven long year, and upwards, but of the potent, grave, and reverend seniors—potent as Pope in his most potential mood, grave as Johnson in his most specific gravity, reverend as Warburton in his right reverend overseership. If he scouts the "narrow pedagogism of Seymour, the blatant stupidity of Becket, and the complacent feeble-mindedness of Jackson," so does he "the conceited wantonness of Pope, the arrogance of Warburton, the solemn inflexibility of Johnson, and the smartness and mechanical ear of Steevens"—all of whom he accuses of seeking to commit outrages on the text quite as insufferable as those of the small fry fore-going. Mr. Dyce is the editor in whom he seems to place most confidence, and from whose prospective labours he expects most, though Mr. Dyce is remonstrated with on his "needless diplays of reading of worthless books,” and his habit of heaping up, as if a good sorites were to come of it, "instance upon instance from old volumes in all modern languages …. upon Shakespeare's text without illustrating it." Mr. Knight is complimented, as unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled among fellow-editors in intelligent veneration for his Master, and a sympathetic apprehension of his thoughts—but is gently rated for his "superstitious veneration for the first folio.” Mr. Collier, too, is complimented on his devotion to the study of old English literature, especially to that of the Elizabethan age: but as an expositor of the Bard of all time, he is now regarded as stark naught. Mr. Collier's recent publication has excited our Shakspeare's Scholar to something like fever-heat—that publication[1] of marginalia, so multifarious in character and so mysterious in origin, whereby hangs a tale.
But 'tis an old tale now, and often told. We have all heard, it may be presumed, the story of Mr. Collier's singular purchase: how in the spring of 1849 he happened to be in the shop of the late Mr. Rodd, of
- ↑ Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare's Plays, from early MS. Corrections in a copy of the Folio, 1632, in the Possession of J. Payne Collier, Esq., F.S.A. Second Edition. London: Whittaker. 1853.
