riddle, and I wish most fervently you may have the luck to solve it; to which end too, I will gladly communicate such hints, if they may possibly give any light. Justice Shallow, in this Play, is supposed to be Sir Thomas Lucy, who persecuted Shakespeare for deer-stealing The Lucys, as we find by Dugdale's Warwickshire, quartered 12 fishes called Luces in their arms; and of Luces, Gesner tells us, there is a marine and a fresh-water species. I was thinking that if in Heraldry the fresh-water Luce might signify a younger branch, and the sea Luce a head of a family, and Falstaff were to say this to Shallow, it might carry a good deal of concealed satire; but then, as Sir Hugh interposes his dialogue, and as there is no reply made to this supposed satire, I am obliged to disapprove my own conjecture.

I can have room but for one more; and that shall be out of Hamlet, p. 228:

Haste me to know, that I with wings as swift

As Meditation, or the Thoughts of Love, &c.

Here is either, I suspect, a most barbarous tautology, or a great mistake in terms. Thought, indeed, is swift; but Meditation is not so. That is, I take it, a deliberate action of the soul, by which we weigh and ponder our first simple ideas, and so form a judgment upon them.

I imagine our Author wrote,

As Mediation, or the Thoughts of Love.

So a tautology will be quite removed; and a beauty, in my poor opinion, added to the thought.

I wish the paper would further comply with my inclination: but it shall, in yielding me the scope to confess myself, dear Sir,

Your most sincerely obliged humble servant,
LEW. THEOBALD.

VOL. II.

R

LETTER

LETTER X.,

To Mr. WARBURTON, at Newark. DEAR SIR, Thursday, 29 May, 1729. I have received the pleasure of your last, and very zealously embrace the encouragement you give me of corresponding; which I shall always be fond of continuing, so long as you indulge me in it, and I am capable of desiring self-improvement. I entirely come into your thoughts, that this epistolary intercourse should be kept up with all the negligence of conversation; a studied elegance of style would here be affectation, and an impediment in its consequence. Therefore, to proceed in your own method, I shall first trouble you with my thoughts on your observations, and then subjoin my own fresh enquiries.

As to your explanation of the Basilisco-like, there can be no dispute but it is very ingenious. I am only afraid, as you say on another of mine, lest it should be thought too refined. It carries an allusion in a single word, without the thought being any further prosecuted; consequently must be very dark to the person spoken to, as well as to the whole

audience.

The difficulty of Limoges and Austria is sufficiently cleared up to me.

And I am no less indebted for your reconciling me to three-man Songmen, as it now stands in our Author. It was my own thought once, that it meant one that could sing all the three parts in any musical composition; but I was staggered in this by Mr. Galliard's opinion, that the word could hardly bear that idea: yet I am convinced it may, in spite of his technical judgment.

And now to come to some short remarks upon new passages transmitted to me.

the

Tempest,

Tempest, p. 6:

If you can command these elements to silence, and work the Peace of the present, we will not hand, &c. You propose - of the Prease; but Prease, or Press, I am afraid, signifies only a Crowd, not a Tumult. I have all along read and understood the passage thus:

the peace o' the present, i. e. on the Present. That is, if you can command silence, and appease these elements on the instant, at a word's speaking, what need we be at such labour in working a ship?

We split, we split, &c.

Prosp.

These two lines, I conceive, were designed to be spoken as by the ship's crew, who make a confused clamour within, on their apprehensions of sinking. Master of a full poor Cell. These two, I confess, taken as adjectives, have such a contrariety in their sense, that the expression approaches very near to a blunder. But I have always understood the first of them to be adverbially coupled to the other with an hyphen;

As to the next,

Master of a full-poor* Cell.

Like one who having into Truth, &c.

here you propose to substitute-injured Truth - as a cure for the sense. I will tell you how I have read and conceived it; and then submit it to you, whether there needs any recourse to that change:

Like one

Who having into Truth, by telling 't oft,

Made such a Sinner of his Memory,

To credit his own Lie.

i. e. says Prospero,

My brother has behaved so like a common Liar that tells his false stories so often over, till he de

* Perpauperis, perexiguæ Cellulæ. And the French, I remember, express themselves in the very same manner, fort-demalade, fortiter, &c.

R 2

ceives

ceives even his own memory, and credits his own Lie into a Truth;

that is, believes his own Lie to be true; as Antonio acted the outward face and deputation of power so long, till he began to imagine himself the real Duke.

Our Hint of Woe

which you would correct to-Stint. But we ought, perhaps, to remember, that, in many passages, our Author uses Hint, for Argument, Theme, Cue, &c.; and then, perhaps, a change may not be so neces

sary.

I very readily embrace your-antient Moral for Morsel; it carries probability, and heightens the. Wit. But now to,

Each Putter-out of five for one.

I have not been without a conjecture something like yours here. You say, it seems to level at money advanced and contributed at 20 per cent. for promotion of discoveries in the West Indies, But then should not the text be,

Each Putter-out of one for five?

Morison, I remember, in his Travels, tells us, he put money into the hands of friends before both his expeditions, to receive so much more if he lived to return. And he speaks of this method as of a thing usually done by Travellers of that time.

But, if you will give me leave, I will subjoin my construction of what I really think our Author meant by this passage.

Each Putter-out of five for one, &c. i. e. each Voyager, or Traveller.

(So in Two Gentlemen of Verona, p. 150.

Put forth their Sons to seek Preferment out.) And his context seems to be this:- When we were boys, who would believe there were dewlapt Mountaineers, or men with their heads in their breasts, which now every five Travellers, that put

out,

out, bring us vouchers of, for one that pretends to dispute the veracity? And it is not improbable, I think, that our Author here might be paying either an oblique compliment, or throwing out a sarcasm, on Sir Walter Raleigh, who in his Travels (which were printed along with Hackluyt's Voyages in the year 1600) tells us of a nation, called Ewaipanons, (bless us from the hard name!) whose heads appear not above their shoulders: " which (as our Traveller very gravely subjoins) though it may be thought a mere fable, yet for mine own part I am resolved it is true, because every Child in the Provinces of Arcamaia and Canuri affirm the same."

This is my conjecture of the passage; which is in the balance, till it meets your sanction, or refutation. Grind their joints

With dry convulsions.

I like very well the substitution of your epithetwry convulsions. I must own, I cannot tell physically, whether convulsions ever do arise from any dry cause; if they do, there seems some consonance of idea preserved in dry and grind. Here the Doctors must come in to our aid.

I shall be very impatient for your explanation of the Scene you mention in Lear, if you can afford me a Letter extra upon that subject.

But now, dear Sir, it is time I should think of your dismission for the present; which shall be, after subjoining my list of those places that are dark to me in the Tempest.

P. 10. To trash for overtopping.

Does trash, by any county dialect, signify lop, cut off?

P. 12. When I have decked the sea.

Does he mean "shed tears into the sea from the deck of the ship," or what else?