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If this mode of reasoning from analogy is adopted in one instance, it should be carried out in all, and cæteris paribus we may, upon the same grounds, assume that Shakespeare, amongst his many imputed vocations and assumptions, was also a professional jester, a clown, a carrier, a watchman, a pedagogue, a parson, a beadle, a bailiff, a country justice, a courtier, a dandy, a lord mayor, a lord chamberlain, a king; seeing that his technicalities are as accurately individualized in all these characters as distinct personal identity can separate them. Or, to go even a step further, why should he not have been a ghost, as what but actual experience could have shadowed forth such a veritable reflection of disembodied being as he has given us in the buried majesty of Denmark? No, we equally discard all these suppositions, and have still a blank in Shakespeare's life which we can only fill up by vague surmises, or by the more probable conclusion that he was struggling in London for the competence he finally attained. He was married in his nineteenth year. At twenty-three he gave up seeking a livelihood in Stratford, and went to London. These are the received dates At twenty-eight, in 1589, we find him enrolled as a member of the Blackfriar's Theatre, and from that time he followed the path in life which Providence, circumstances, or destiny, or fortune, or his own self-will, or whatever it may please casuistical wranglers to call it, had chalked out for him. Aubrey asserts, that from the time of his leaving school, most probably in 1579, until his departure or flight from Warwickshire, he was a schoolmaster. This, again, is unsupported by the slightest proof, and has nothing to do with the hiatus between 1583 and 1589, which so many vague suppositions have sought to fill up. But, if true, it would account for the learning he subsequently displayed, which, though small in the eyes of a university graduate, who had gone through the classes, was far beyond the narrow modicum allowed to him by Dr. Farmer and those who adopt the conclusions in his so-called "Unanswerable Essay," which have been so frequently refuted by Dr. Maginn, &c., that they may fairly be considered as out of court, and ex

cluded by the statute of limitations. Shakespeare's Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish quotations are remarkable, and as correctly introduced as his technicalities in science, natural history, jurisprudence, and mechanics.

In nineteen cases out of twentynay, in ninety-nine out of a hundred— simple solutions are nearer the mark than abstruse theories. We have our own, founded on this basis, and they amount to this, on long consideration of the voluminous pleadings which have occupied so many enthusiastic heads, and given rise to such a pile of sophistical commentary: we opine that Shakespeare received a better education than is generally supposed; that this early, though incomplete training, left deep traces on an impressionable soil; that he loved book knowledge, and devoured it rabidly whenever it came in his way; that he studied still more extensively from the living fount of nature, and the stirring world in which he moved; that his discursive genius supplied him with a hundred ideas where narrow capacity conceives but half a one; that his memory was tenacious beyond parallel, and that it united the still more rare combination of retaining all that it acquired, and of calling those stores into use at the exact moment when they were most needed. It was by this marvellous subdivision of one commanding faculty that his mind heaped up an exhaustless magazine of images, with the power of employing them at will. In fine

"Creation's boundless temple was his school,

Mankind his study! 'Tis a royal college, Endow'd most nobly by the King of kings!

There Nature in one hour teaches us more Than in an age your Greek and Latin lore!"

That a transcendent genius should acquire almost universal knowledge from thought, observation, study, and intercourse with his fellow-beings, is surprising, but possible; while it is physically impossible that he should find time within a narrow segment of four or five years, to learn even half a dozen trades to excellence by practical experiment. Physical power has a limited and ascertained standard; but the orbit of such a mind as Shakespeare's cannot be determined

as we gauge the circumference of a beer-barrel, or by any average estimate of man in the ordinary exercise of man's faculties.

What becomes of the divine estro, the inspiration of poetry, if we connect its loftiest images, its sublimest descriptions, with the household avocation or manual drudgery of the poet? Burns was a tiller of the ground before he was an exciseman; but it was not his acquaintance with ploughs and spades, or his nightsearches after an illicit still or a fraudulent measure, or his incidental carousings, which taught him to write "Tam O'Shanter," and the "Cotter's Saturday Night." Petrarch did not find the germ of his sonnets in the pandects of Justinian, so long his daily task, in a lawyer's dismal backroom; nor did Goethe and Walter Scott conceive "Faust" and "Marmion" through any congenial alembic associating a high stool and desk with the fountain of Hippocrene. John Bunyan's diurnal manipulation of pots and pans, and the shouldering of Brown Bess, supplied him with no visions of the beautiful allegory which, though shaped in prose, is conceived in poetry, and will last as long as the language in which it is written. Homer, Virgil, and Milton are liberal in their use of technicalities, but we have never heard it surmised that they were guildsmen of the arts and callings they so vividly describe. No one ever thought of writing down Homer an operative blacksmith or a Benvenuto Cellini, because he so skilfully details the handicraft of Vulcan when forging the armour and embossing the shield of Achilles; or of adding Virgil to the list of ornamental gardeners because he dilates on a quincunx with the gusto of "Capability Brown;" or of enlisting Milton as a trooper, because he commemorates the march of the Satanic host, accompanied by their band, with military precision. If we set up as a standard of our estimate of what men are by habit, practice, or profession, inferences derived from what they have written, we shall risk falling into the error of a female worshipper of Thompson's "Seasons," who said she felt convinced from his poems that the author spent his days in the country, and was a great swimmer. Now, the gentle Jemmy lived

in London, preferred the shady side of Pall Mall to the most luxuriant landscape, and never ventured on natatorial exercise.

We could have wished that the labour devoted by Messrs. Knight, Collier, Halliwell, Barry Cornwall, Campbell, Britton, Symmons, Staunton, Fullom, and many other loving contributors to the biography of Shakespeare, had cleared up more surmises, and established a greater maximum of facts; but we are sincerely grateful for their efforts, though not able to accord with all their deductions. They have agreeably exercised our speculative organs, have furnished matter well suited to the enjoyment of those who are fortunate enough to afford the indulgence of hora subsecive, and, as Dr. Johnson says, have added considerably to "the public stock of harmless pleasure." We look back to the hours employed in the perusal of their volumes with a sentiment resembling that with which Cowper records his impression of Garrick's Stratford Jubilee in 1769:

"It was a hallow'd time: decorum reign'd, And mirth without offence. No few returned,

Doubtless, much edified, and all refreshed!"

From Shakespeare's personal history, a natural concatenation leads us to the history of his text, which is enveloped in equal uncertainty. Seventy-two years ago, Malone, in the preface to his own edition, said, rather presumptuously, "The text of the great author seems now to be finally settled." He was as far from the mark as the finality men were in 1832, when they said the Reform Bill would settle every thing. There have been at least seventy-two new editions since Malone's, each labouring to cry down its precursor or contemporary, and all helping to enshroud the real substance in such a fog of conjecture that it has become almost as apocryphal as the foundation of Sir John Cutler's silk stockings. Capell, Steevens, and Malone devoted their lives to Shakespeare. Fortunately for their enthusiasm, they had both means and leisure. Capell gave twenty years to his version, and is said to have made ten transcripts of each play with his own hand. With

all our veneration for the "divine Williams," we cannot but call this a' sinful waste of time. Steevens published four editions, in all of which his own name is conjoined with that of Dr. Johnson. The last of 1793, in fifteen volumes, 8vo, received the title of "The Immaculate," from the supposed purity of the imprint. Steevens loudly vaunted its superiority, and defies the most searching investigation to point out a single error arising from carelessness. He was as confident in his printer as the erudite Lipsius in his memory, but we never heard that he challenged the same desperate test. This impression of 1793 is still considered by many as the editio optima. There were twentyfive copies on large paper struck off for presents, which are very scarce, and great guns, indeed, when fired off to astound an open-mouthed curiosity-hunter. There is one at Althorp, the editor's own copy, left by his will to Lord Spencer, and adorned with illustrations which must have cost at least £1,000. Another may be inspected in the library of Eton College, bequeathed thereto, with the rest of his valuable collection, by Anthony Storer.* Malone has lately found an elaborate biographer. As Steevens has been less fortunate, a few episodial words here on such an eminent Shakespearean may, perhaps, not be considered irrelevant.

This celebrated commentator and critic was the only son of Captain G. Steevens, of Stepney, many years in the East India Company's service, and afterwards a director, who died in 1768. The subject of our brief memoir was born at Stepney, in 1736. He received his early education at a grammar-school, at Kingston-onThames, from whence, in due course, he graduated to Eton, and so on to King's College, Cambridge, where he was admitted a fellow commoner, in 1751 or 1752. He also figured as an officer in the Essex Militia on its first establishment; but literature was his passion and chief employment through life. As he inherited a handsome fortune, was a bachelor, and lived within his income, he had no occasion

to adopt any particular profession." He enjoyed his "learned ease," and possessed amply the means of gratifying a pervading taste;-the collation of rare works on classical learning, literary antiquity, and the arts connected with that pursuit.

George Steevens was a valuable member of the world of letters, and a prominent star in the constellation of Shakespearean editors and critics, in the century in which the names of Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, Capell, Johnson, Edwards, Gray, Tyrwhitt, Upton, Montague, Farmer, Ritson, Heath, Richardson, Reed, Mason, and Malone, are conspicuous. Endowed with versatility of talent, he was active with pen and pencil; with the one there was little he could not compose or arrange; and with the other, nothing he could not imitate so closely that doubts arose as to which was the example and which the copy. Many are the ornamental little pages he supplied, careless of time or trouble, for rare, old black-letter tomes, from which they had been barbarously torn; and so accurate were his pen and ink fac-similes, that even microscopic comparison could scarcely distinguish them from the originals. Steevens wrote verses in the Annual Register, contributed to "Nicholl's Anecdotes of Hogarth," and also assisted in the "Biographia Dramatica." But those are merely his literary relaxations. The labour of his life was centered in Shakespeare, although we do not know that he emulated the literal drudgery of Capell, alluded to above. But he produced an edition of the text more valuable than Capell's, accompanied by a readable preface.

But with his many requisites as a commentator, with all his patience and research, his sagacity and acumen, his intimate acquaintance with the language and literature, the manners, customs, and superstitions of the age of

Shakespeare, he had some damaging defects of temper, of heart, and of taste; a pruriency in his imagination, and a malignancy in his wit; a constitutional coarseness of thought which

* Anthony Storer, who died 4th July, 1799, was a celebrated wit and fine gentleman of his day, of the George Selwyn school. See many of his letters in the "Auckland Correspondence," published by Bentley.

dwelt too minutely on any passage that could be twisted into an indelicate allusion, and which led him to indulge in unsparing ridicule at the expense of brother candidates for critical fame. He had a disposition to hunt after ingenious rather than obvious meanings; a proneness to raise difficulties where none really existed, and an ear for rhythm so painfully modulated that he stumbled at every broken or inharmonious line, and eked it out according to his own fancy; persuading himself that he thus perfected the meaning of Shakespeare, and faithfully filled up the lacunæ progressively multiplied by time, careless typography, negligence or ignorance. But his ear was mechanically exact rather than poetically tuned. He thought more of a perfect iambic than of a rich, imaginative idea. He measured verses by the number of feet, rather than by the melody or grace of expression. "Mr. Steevens," observes Kemble, "had no ear for the colloquial metre of our old dramatists. It is not possible, on any other supposition, to account for his whimsical desire, and the pains he took to fetter the enchanting freedom of Shakespeare's numbers, and compel them into the heroic march and cadence of epic versification. The native wood notes wild,' that could delight the cultivated ear of Milton, must not be modulated anew, to indulge the fastidiousness of those who read verses by their fingers." John Kemble, however, falls into the opposite extreme. In the acting versions of his adaptations of Shakespeare, the broken lines are as numerous and arbitrary as Steevens's gratuitous completions.

Dr. Drake, speaking of critical emendations generally, has these salutary remarks:-"It is, indeed, a most melancholy consideration, that some of the worst passions of the human heart, and some of the coarsest language by which literature has been disgraced, are to be found amongst the race of commentators, a class of men who, from the very nature of their pursuit, that of

emendatory or laudatory criticism, might be thought exempt from such degrading propensities. In this country, more especially, has this disgusting exhibition, even to the present day, sullied the labours of the commentators on our elder dramatic poesy; and, above all, it is to be deplored, that Shakespeare, whose character was remarkable for its suavity and benevolence, who has seldom been mentioned, indeed, by his contemporaries without the epithets of gentle or beloved accompanying his name, should have his pages polluted by such a mass of idle contention, and vindictive abuse." These remarks apply forcibly to the recent squabble on the "Perkins Folio," (of which more anon), which has given birth to as much acrimonious invective as Ritson or Steevens could have vented in their bitterest moods.

When Steevens was employed on his magnum opus, he revised the proof-sheets with untiring diligence." To this work he devoted solely, and exclusively of all other attentions, a period of eighteen months. During that time he left his house, at Hampstead, every morning at one o'clock, with the patrol, and proceeding without any thought of weather or season, called up the compositor, and woke all his devils :

"Him late from Hampstead, journeying to his book,

Aurora oft for Cephalus mistook;
What time he brush'd the dews with hasty
pace,

To meet the printer's dev'let face to
face."

At the chambers of his friend, Isaac Reed, where he was allowed to admit himself, with a sheet of the Shakespeare letter-press ready for correction, he found a room prepared to receive him, also any book he might wish to consult; and to Mr. Reed's pillow he could apply on any doubt or sudden suggestion, for a knowledge of English literature, perhaps equal to his own. This nocturnal toil greatly accelerated the printing of the work, as while the printers slept the editor was awake;

"Macbeth and Richard III.," an Essay by J. P. Kemble, 1817, p. 201. "Memorials of Shakespeare," 1828, p. 20.

"Mathews' Pursuits of Literature."

VOL. LXI. NO. CCCLXI.

2

and thus in less than twenty months he completed his last splendid edition. That he contented himself with being a commentator, arose, probably, from the habits of his life, and his devotion to the name with which it was his ambition to connect his own inseparably. On his last edition of Shakespeare, subsequently enlarged by materials he left behind him to twenty-one volumes of the same size, and printed under the care of Mr. Reed in 1803, after his own death, the literary reputation of George Steevens must entirely rest.

He was a man of untiring perseverance in every thing he undertook; sometimes constant, but not always consistent; crotchety and eccentric, impulsive and variable, vindictive and placable, prudent and liberal. He was seldom seen to give eleemosynary sixpences to sturdy beggars or sweepers of crossings; but few persons distributed bank-notes with more generosity. Many acts of pecuniary kindness might be recorded as offsets to his reputed failings. Without any ostensible reason or assigned cause, he would sometimes suddenly abandon his most confirmed habits. He discontinued his daily visits to White's, the bookseller, after many years of clock-work attendance, and would never say why; and he left Stockdale, whom he took up on quitting White's, in the same unaccountable manner. He never took a pinch of snuff after he lost his box in St. Paul's Church-yard, though he was much addicted to the indulgence, and in the habit of making his memoranda by bits of paper in his box. He bestowed much time and cash on his collection of books and prints. He bought largely at Baker's auction of Sir Clement Dormer's library, collected by General Dormer, where he got the rare French translation of Xenophon's works, by Pyramus de Candale, Cologne, 1613, bound in morocco, and worth forty pounds, for twelve guineas. He had the second folio of Shakespeare which had belonged to Charles I., with notes in the king's own hand, the royal arms, and the motto, "Dum spiro spero. He never would sit for his picture, but had no objection to illus

trate his own Shakespeare with 1,500 portraits of all the persons named in the text or notes, of which he could make drawings or procure engravings. His set of Hogarths, bequeathed to Mr. Windham, was supposed to be the most complete that ever was collected. His corrected and enlarged copy of his own Shakespeare of 1793, prepared for a new edition, he consigned to Isaac Reed, with a bequest of two hundred guineas. The bulk of his fortune, including his library, he left to his niece and residuary legatee, Miss Steevens, with whom he held little intercourse while he lived. There were only two or three small legacies in money. The library contained many rare and curious tomes, the collection of which formed one of the owner's chief delights. It was sold by auction very soon after his death. The catalogue of 1,943 articles produced £2,740 158.

Steevens's learning was not confined to English literature. He was equally well acquainted with the belles lettres of Europe; also a classical scholar and historian of the first order. He possessed a strong original genius, and an overflowing wit. With these qualities, his colloquial powers were brilliant beyond those of ordinary men. In argument, he was uncommonly eloquent, and his eloquence was at once logical and diversified. His descriptions were so true to nature, his figures so distinctly sketched, so curiously selected, and so harmoniously grouped, that he was sometimes called a speaking Hogarth. In his sportive humour he descended to ribaldry, and was too prone to catch the ridiculous in persons and things. He was one of those men who would rather wound a friend than lose a joke; a disposition which made him many enemies, and gave him a reputation for ill-nature beyond what he really deserved. Ritson, when they quarrelled, called him Sycorax; and he retorted by calling Ritson Caliban.

There are those who would rather sustain a positive injury than writhe under a sarcastic criticism; or, at least, of such criticisms as were uttered by Steevens, which were remembered by all who heard, and repeated

* King George the III. bought it at Steevens's sale for eighteen guineas,

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