must be completed in the stanza. It is a sort of bed of Procrustes, in which the sense must be stretched and extended, or cramped and amputated till it is adapted to the measure. Redundancy in the one case, obscurity or inversion in the use of uncommon phrases in the other, are therefore not easily avoided. Perhaps the following verse is an example of the latter defect. "He bare his bow before the king, And led two grey-hounds in a string, With skins of snowy hue.

He was a ready man on horse; Was better none to hunt of force, Or brace the sounding yew.” The " snowy hue," and "sounding yew" are legitimate poetical words, but as they stand they excite a suspicion that the ordinary mode of expression was departed from merely rythmi gratia, and so capricious is a critical ear, that such a suspicion is always offensive. To explain our meaning, we venture to throw the stanza into more simple language.

He bore the quiver of the king,
And led two greyhounds in a string,
As white as mountain's now.
He was a gallant man on horse,
Was better none to hunt at force

Or brace the sounding bow.

This alteration may serve to illustrate our meaning, but much better examples of the sense and the verse being happily completed together, occur in the stanzas which immediately follow.

"Now fast beside the path-way stood
A ruin'd village, shagg'd with wood,
A melancholy place ;
The ruthless Conqueror cast down
(Wo worth the deed!) that little town,
To lengthen out his chace.
Among the fragments ofthe church,
A raven there had found a perch,

She flicker'd with her wing;
She stirr'd not, she, for voice or shout,
She moved not for that revel-rout,

But croak'd upon the king. Here first the merry huntsmen loose Lyme-dog and grey-hound from the

noose;

Crack sapling, gorse, and thorn; Then each man's hand was to his quiver, Then rang the woods as they would shi

ver,

With hound and bugle-horn."

The notes on both poems are very interesting, but those on the Red King particularly so, from the local information which the author gives us concerning the antiquities of the New Forest. We have but room to say that they fully confirm what some historians have doubted, -the devastation which the chronicles state the conqueror to have made, in order to lengthen out his chase.

There are most beautiful engravings in this work, from designs by Smirke, truly valuable both as pieces of art, and records of ancient costume. The letter-press by Ballantyne, of Edinburgh, is perhaps the most splendid piece of typography which has yet issued from the press of the Scottish Bodoni.

THE collections of plays, which have been published under titles nearly similar, are numerous. The most extensive and popular was Bell's; nor have we the slightest wish to detract from its merits; equal as they were to any thing which could have been expected from the scale and price of publication, at a time when the expences of printing, paper and engraving fell far short of half what they are now. But it is no praise of the present work to assert its superiority over all former collections; because it professes to take higher and more classical ground, both in point of editorship and embellishnient; and on its own loftier professions, not on a comparison with more humble precursors, it must be judged.

In this view, it stands within our province to observe, that it has hitherto been customary to omit Shakspeare altogether, under the idea that our immortal bard, after the Bible and the Whole Duty of Man, takes precedence in the book-case furniture of every house. But the editors of the British threatre have judged rightly, that it would be equally absurd to omit Shakspeare on this ground as to exclude Milton from an edition of the poets for a similar reason. They have therefore given Shakspeare, as far as his pieces are on the list of acting plays. In drawing this line, they have exercised a sound discretion;

nor has there ever been a time, when the exercise of a sound discretion was so practicable. For Shakspeare now is in full possession of the stage, as well as of the closet: he is critically and deeply read by the first practical commentators, as well as by the first actor of the age. Whatever may be the comparative merits of Garrick and Kemble as delineators of the passions, which we, though professing, as reviewers, to wear wigs, do not wear such old-fashioned full-bottomed wigs as to be able to estimate from our own observation, the palm of critical skill has never adinitted of a contrast. The manner in which the prompt book of both theatres, (which happily for good taste, have been successively under the same management,) is now regulated, has altered back Shakspeare from the interpolations of his former al terers, into an abridged, but pure and native state of wood-note wildness. From these regulated promptbooks, and Mr. Kemble's own editions, where his restorations and arrangements have been sufficiently important, the text has been faithfully and accurately taken. The text of the other authors, both ancient and modern, has been collated with equal care, and adopted on the saine autho rity.

The prefaces are given by Mrs. Inchbald; so that the task of criti

cism has devolved on one, who has herself written well, and who, by writing successfully also, has as it were identified her own with the public taste.

A detailed account of a collection, like that under review, would be superfluous, were it not impracticable. We shall not therefore either give any specimen of her critical disquisitions, nor enumerate instances wherein we agree with her decisions, or differ from them. Suffice it to say, that the style of these essays is always lively, the remarks very rarely otherwise than ingenious, and the positions in a great majority of cases just. We were particularly pleased with the easy, unpretending manner in which the biographical sketches are interwoven, and with a certain facility of introducing little, entertaining anecdo es, to fill up the allotted measure of each preface, where the accumulation of works by the same author would have worn the web of mere dramatic criticism threadbare, or have compelled the repetition of the same canons under different phraseology.

We cannot help regretting, that the fair preface-writer should have involved herself in a controversy with, and of course exposed herself to the sarcasm of, the lively and humourous George Coleman the younger. We think his own provocation very slender; but his father has certainly been less obliged to her good nature and candour (no man stood less in need of either) than almost any dramatic writer whom she has reviewed. Keenness of rebuke in the cause of a fa

ther our wigs, though not quite full-bottomed, but somewhat of the Brutus cut, must ever approve: as yet the attack seems unreasonably severe. The lady's reply, humble, and on the whole conciliatory, has a touch or two on the subject of Madame Dacier and Homer, which, though not likely to produce a broad grin on the features of her correspondent, may not be altogether unproductive of sensation. Our advice to both parties is, what our advice always will be to persons of high and unquestionable merit, to be friends.

We have dilated so much on the foregoing topics, that our additional observations must be very brief. The collectors in the dramatic line will here find several modern pieces, the copy right of which has hitherto been kept up for the benefit of the theatres, and which are now for the first time submitted to the ordeal of closet examination. The pictorial decorations are on the whole in a tasteful and superior style. The merits of the individual engravings must of course be very various. Scarcely any of them are below mediocrity, and the best are singularly beautiful. Much attention has been bestowed, and very successfully, on the selection and execution of the portraits. Some of them have not, we believe, been engraved before, and very few in so fine a style. The work, therefore, must prove highly acceptable to the frequenters of the theatre, and the fine paper edition, with proof impressions, is the best, indeed the only library book of the kind extant.

BEFORE we proceed to state what Mr. Douce has done in these

volumes, we must thank him for what he has not done. We must

thank him in the name of the public for having embodied his researches in this form, and not publishing an edition of Shakspeare, after the example of so many of his predecessors. Far be it from us to wish that the fashion of commentating upon Shakspeare were at an end; but if his commentators were to go on as they have begun, still printing text with comment, and heaping Pelion upon Ossa in their lucubrations, Shakspeare in the next age would out-volume the Cyclopædias. There is another inconvenience in these variorum editions, no person reads the notes regularly as they occur, and to read the text in them when it comes leaf after leaf like a running title over the small type, is exceedingly unpleasant, the fingers have to run a race with the eye, and you have to turn backward and forward, backward and forward, when you wish to take in the whole of a passage at once, and rest upon it.

The first part of these curious volumes we shall make a few extracts from, and add such remarks as have occurred to us.

"Gon.-How lush and lusty the grass looks!"

"Lush, as Mr. Malone observes, has

not yet been rightly interpreted. It is, after all, an old word synonymous with loose. In the Promptuarium parvulorum 1516. 4to. we find lushe or slacke, laxus." The quotation from Golding, who renders turget by this word, confirms the foregoing definition, and demonstrates that as applied to grass, it means loose or swollen, thereby expressing the state of that vegetable when, the fibres being relaxed, it expands to its fullest growth." An active lusty young man is called a lish fellow in Cumberland. This is probably the same word, and cannot be synonymous with loose. Mr. Douce's seems a forced interpretation.

p. 31. Beads Mr. Douce is right in ascribing the invention of the ro

sary to the Hindoos, from whom the Catholics borrowed it through the Moors. The Dominicans claim the invention for their accursed founder, the only saint in whom no solitary speck of goodness can be discovered: it was manifestly introduced by that order, and they therefore are most likely to know by whom. The tales of its earlier use are fabrications of the Benedictines; they were jealous of the Predicants, and stole and antedated many of their most popular inventions. No form of devotion was supposed to be more efficacious than this, which required, says one of our English catholics, no more knowledge than to

say

the Pater-noster and Ave Maria; nor more charge than the price of a pair of beads, nor any choice of place or situation of body, but as it shall like the party, either to stand, sit, lie, walk, or kneel:-so" that from this so fruitful means should be excluded neither the husbandman in the fields, nor the traveller in his journey, nor the labourer with his toiling, nor the simple by his unskillfulness, nor the woman by her sex, nor the married by their estate, nor the young by their ignorance, nor the aged by their impotency, nor the sick by their infirmity, nor the poor for want of ability, nor the blind for want of sight."

p. 36. The teston must have been coined in France earlier than 1513, for K. Manuel of Portugal coined a money by that denomination in 1504, and the name is confessedly taken from the French.

P. 47. Her eyes are grey as glass. "This was in old times the favourite colour of the eyes in both sexes." Old poets and romancers we may be sure took their ideas of beauty from the high-born, and so long as we find so long as we find grey and green eyes, and golden or flaxen hair in their descriptions, so long is it probable that the higher ranks in

Europe remained of unmixed Gothic blood.

p. 57. Rook is still in common use for a gamester.

"Sim.-Marry, sir, the city-ward" "The old editions read pitty-ward, the modern editors pitty-wury," says Mr. Stevens, who in this edition has aban. doned the best part of a former note where he had proposed to read petty ward, which is the right word, and of the same import as the old one. That such a word formerly existed is demonstrable from its still remaining as a proper name; and near Wimbledon is a wood so called, probably from the owner. Mr. Stevens mistakes in supposing ward to towards in this instance, where it is put for the division of a city; nor does his quotation from William of Worcester assist him. The via de Petty and the Pettey gate might be named after the hun dred of Pettey in Somersetshire. In Lyne's Map of Cambridge, 1574, we find the petticurie."

mean

One of the oldest, and certainly the most remarkable street in Bristol is called the Pittey. Pithay the name is spelt upon a modern board; the parish-officers by whose orders it was set up, supposing perhaps that it ought to be so spelt because the hay-market is near to the bottom. Was there ever a charitable institution in England resembling the misericordia of some Catholic countries? If so, this name would be readily explained.

p. 72. I will knog his urinals about his knaves cos ard." This word reminds us of a curious anecdote in the history of Olivares. The duke of Lerma had laboured with some success to influence Philip IV. at that time prince, against this aspiring favourite, and Philip accordingly let him know that he was tired of him. Olivares happened at that time to be handing him his urinal. He made a profound reverence at this expression of the prince's displeasure,

kissed the utensil as he delivered it,

and retired.

p. 75. The mufflers probably came to us from the east, perhaps This through the Spanish Moors. is the word by which antifaces in Amadis should have been rendered.

p. 99. "What man! defy the devil: consider, he's an enemy to mankind." "It was very much the practice with old writers, both French and English, to call the devil, the enemy, by way of pre-eminence." A more extraordinary practice prevails in Scotland; there they call the devil the ould gude mon, and speak of him with as much fear and respect as Scotch reviewers do of his vice-gerent Bonaparte.

p. 122. "Where youth and cost and witless bravery keeps." To keep is still used in this sense at Cambridge.

p. 130. A set of initial letters representing the dance of death is also used in the Benedictine chronicle of Yefes, in those volumes which were printed at Yracke in Navarre. But they are by no means well executed.

p. 135. Padre Frey, father friar, is a customary mode of address, and regularly used in title pages, &c.

p. 211, Tareny Spain. Ronsard calls the Spaniards," peuples bazanéz," Mores d'Occident.

p. 222, Galardon, the Spanish word for guerdon, is so like that it must be radically the same word, and so unlike that it seems to destroy both the etymologies noticed by Mr. Douce,

«PET.-Tush, tush, fear boys with bugs.

"To fear is to frighten, In Ma thew's Bible, psalm xci. v. 5, is thus rendered: "Thou shalt not nede to be afraied for any bugs by night." In the Hebrew it is "terror of the night;" a curious passage, evidently alluding to that horrible sensation the night-mare, which in all ages has been regarded as the oper