Richard the Third harangues his army before the battle ' of Bosworth: Remember whom ye are to cope withal, "Our mother," Mr. Theobald perceives to be wrong, and Henry was somewhere secreted on the continent: he reads therefore, and all the editors after him, Long kept in Bretagne at his mother's cost. But give me leave to transcribe a few more lines from Holinshed, and you will find at once, that Shakespeare had been there before me :-" Ye see further, how a companie of traitors, theeves, outlaws and runnagates be aiders and partakers of his feat and enterprise.—And to begin with the erle of Richmond captaine of this rebellion, he is a Welch milksop-brought up by my moother's meanes and mine, like a captive in a close cage in the court of Francis duke of Britaine." P. 756. Holinshed copies this verbatim from his brother chronicler Hall, edit. 1548, fol. 54; but his printer hath given us by accident the word moother instead of brother; as it is in the original, and ought to be in Shakespeare. I hope, my good friend, you have by this time acquitted our great poet of all piratical depredations on the ancients, and are ready to receive my conclusion.-He remembered perhaps enough of his school-boy learning to put the Hig, hag, hog, into the mouth of Sir Hugh Evans; and might pick up in the writers of the time, or the course of his conversation, a familiar phrase or two of French or Italian : but his studies were most demonstratively confined to nature and his own language. may In the course of this disquisition you have often smiled at "all such reading, as was never read;" and possibly I have indulged it too far: but it is the reading necessary for a comment on Shakespeare. Those who apply solely to the ancients for this purpose, may with equal wisdom study the TALMUD for an exposition of TRISTRAM SHANDY. Nothing but an intimate acquaintance with the writers of the time, who are frequently of no other value, can point out his allusions, and ascertain his phraseology. The reformers of his text are for ever equally positive, and equally wrong. The cant of the age, a provincial expression, an obscure proverb, an obsolete custom, a hint at a person or a fact no longer remembered, hath continually defeated the best of our guessers: You must not suppose me to speak at random, when I assure you, that from some forgotten book or other, I can demonstrate this to you in many hundred places; and I almost wish, that I had not been persuaded into a different employment. Though I have as much of the natale solum about me as any man whatsoever; yet, I own, the primrose path is still more pleasing than the Fosse or the Watling-Strect. Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale Its infinite variety.--- And when I am fairly rid of the dust of topographical antiquity, which hath continued much longer about me than I expected; you may very probably be troubled again with the ever fruitful subject of SHAKESPEARE and his Coм MENTATORS. FARMER. |