then having his own opinion, let the student graft upon this original stock such shoots as shall seem worth while. George Steevens followed Dr. Johnson, in a new departure, deserting the Folios and paying attention to the Quartos. His Advertisement to the Reader prefixed to the edition of twenty of the old Quarto copies (1766) is given in the following collection rather than the later Advertisement to the Steevens and Johnson edition, because it calls attention to these earlier and rarer imprints of Shakespeare's plays.

These Quartos were nearly all published during Shakespeare's life-time, and while some of them are doubtless the " stolen and surreptitious copies" referred to by Heminge and Condell in their "Address to the Great Variety of Readers," some of them bear evidence of enlargement and redaction, perhaps by Shakespeare himself. They offered the only standard of comparison for collation with the Folios, however, and Steevens's work in gathering and reprinting them in four volumes was of the greatest value to all succeeding students.

Steevens opened another new avenue in the enlarging field of criticism by his suggestion, trite enough in these days, but new in the eighteenth century, that the meaning of many blind expressions in the plays might be retrieved by comparison with the works of contemporary authors.

In treating of the publication of scraps and bits of composition, "detached and broken sentences" of authors who never intended them for publication, Steevens rebukes that spirit which is much more prevalent in the twentieth than in the eighteenth century, as is evidenced in shoals of volumes of posthumously printed letters and diaries.

"A man conscious of literary reputation will grow in time afraid to write with tenderness to his sister, or with fondness to his child. That esteem which preserves his letters will at last produce his disgrace; when that which he wrote to his friend or his daughter shall be laid open to the public."

We recall a comparatively recent instance in which the most beautiful and tender love story of modern times was laid open to profane eyes by the son of two great poets.

Edward Capell's Introduction confines itself mainly to the Quartos, and defends the purity of their text from the slur of the players' Preface. His arguments are ingenious and may be said to be convincing, although like every man with a brief, he exaggerates facts which of themselves are sufficient if barely stated.

He reviews briefly the editions preceding his own, discovering their errors and mistakes and failing to note their excellencies. His own work, he states, is based not upon the text of preceding editions (which is the crying sin he declares of his predecessors from Rowe down), but upon the oldest editions, the Quartos when they are available, and the First Folio rather than later reprints. In this course he is entirely justified, but he was not the first or only commentator who did so. Mr. Capell was, until Malone, the most patient, conscientious and praiseworthy of annotators, although Dr. Johnson said of him, “ he doth quibble monstrously." His learning was considerable and his genius for plodding beyond words. His chief contribution to Shakespeare lore, in this Introduction, is in a few lines of explanation why the great poet seemed to lie perdu for two generations; the change of the Court taste which ran to the Masques, in

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the construction of which Ben Johnson was past master, the civil war, the lascivious taste of the Restoration, and the alterations of Shakespeare's own text to please a debased public taste. He notes in this connection, however, that the current of tendency towards Shakespeare never dried up even while "the stream of the public favour ran the other way." Capell also makes a very ingenious and I think judicious examination of the earlier plays of Shakespeare, upon which doubts of his authorship had been cast, because of their blunders and extravagance of language. His searching comments on "Love's Labour's Lost," and "Titus Andronicus," are fine pieces of critical acumen.

When Rowe revived the poet in a convenient and handy form in 1709, and enlivened public interest in his works by the first account of his life that had been published, there was no small circle of his admirers remaining as a nucleus, and from that day there has never been a question as to William Shakespeare's right of eminent domain in English letters.

Capell's Introduction acquired substantial value for his day in the appendix entitled "Origin of Shakespeare's Fables," being a brief description of the known works upon which nearly all the plays were founded. (This is omitted from the reprint in this volume, as cumbersome, and it was by no means complete.) But it was a long step forward and collected material out of which scholars were thereafter to construct the true and complete fabric.3

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Mr. Isaac Reed in 1785 re-edited the Steevens text

The student is here referred to the six volumes called 'Shakespeare's Library," edited first by Payne Collier (1843), revised and enlarged by W. Carew Hazlett (1875).

and is the only known instance in the eighteenth century of a modest editor, as will appear from the following paragraph of his Advertisement:

"The present editor thinks it unnecessary to say anything of his own share in the work except that he undertook it in consequence of an application which was too flattering and honourable to him to decline. He mentions this only to have it known that he did not intrude himself into the situation."

Mr. Reed's Advertisement is here printed and his revision noted because the Steevens text to which he gave his labours was for a long period the standard, and until the beginning of the latter half of the nineteenth century most Shakespearean readers used it.

Mr. Reed deserves to be remembered also as the editor of the first variorum edition of Shakespeare, based on Steevens's text in twenty-one volumes, published in 1803, and practically reprinted in 1813. The next variorum was the work of James Boswell, son of Johnson's" Bozzy," in 1821. The next and most stupendous, by our fellow countryman, Horace Howard Furness, was begun in 1871 and is now undergoing revision by his son.

With Edmond Malone we reach the last of the great editors of the eighteenth century. His patience equalled and his special learning exceeded that of Capell, while his contribution to Elizabethan dramatic history and literature out-ranked all who preceded him, and serves as a mine for all who follow him. He quoted more generally than is customary from Dr. Johnson's Introduction, and took exception to some of his

conclusions.

We must admit that Malone spoke with an authority

no preceding editor could assume, (with the possible exception of Capell) in matters pertaining to the traditions of the English stage, and the customs of the Elizabethan players in handling their parts. He had an extensive first-hand knowledge of the earliest printed copies both of Shakespeare's plays and those of his contemporaries. He displays this knowledge in tracing the gradual process of corruption in a text as it passes through the hands of editors and printers, in several pages of examples (which are omitted from the following reprint of his introduction as concerned only with matters of textual criticism).

Malone's contention that the First Folio has a value which is lacking in the three succeeding ones is based upon the "numerous misrepresentations and interpolations" with which he was familiar from close personal examination. I have long been of his opinion that the first edition of each play is alone of any authority, and that they are properly the basis of annotation and emendation.

He proves by comparison of the First and Second Folios that the editor of the latter was "entirely ignorant of our poet's phraseology"; supporting his argument by quotations to a wearisome extent.

The Introduction is enriched by the wide reading of its author in Elizabethan literature and he makes a stout defence of the editor's work against the complaints, of which we still have' echoes, that the plays themselves are buried under the notes of the commentators. Malone believed the works of Shakespeare to be such a treasure house for the reader and student that he was bold enough to say "When our poet's entire library shall have been discovered, and the fables of all his plays