alluding to the way in which it injuriously affected the national reputation, proceeds to philosophize upon the subject as follows:

"So oft it chances in particular men

That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
that these men

Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,

Being nature's livery, or fortune's star

Their virtues else-be they as pure as grace,

As infinite as man may undergo

Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault:"

and then proceeds to sum up the whole idea in one single sentence: "the dram of eale

Doth all the noble substance over doubt

To his own scandal."

Could anything be more tersely and clearly expressed? The coining of a new word "over doubt" and applying it in the sense of casting a doubt over, is very characteristic of Shakespeare's style, as witness his use of the word “o'erleavens," a few lines before. As Hamlet has just stated the effect of the "vicious mole of nature" was not to destroy men's good qualities, but only to make them "in the general censure take corruption from that particular fault," it was in the same line of thought that he should say, not that the "dram of eale "debases, or adulters, or douts (i.e., extinguishes) "all the noble substance," but simply that it "over-doubts," or casts a doubt over it in the estimation of the general public.

I do not find the reading among any of those given in the New Variorum Hamlet of Dr. Furness, nor is it hinted at in the article in the October SHAKESPEARIANA, so that I am inclined to think the suggestion is a new one. That an idea so very obvious should never have occurred to any of the numerous commentators who have struggled with the obscure passage before, seems very strange, and seems but another illustration of the fable of Sir Launfal, who, after travelling over the world in search of the Holy Grail, found it at last in his own castle. * W. REYNOLDS.

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* In Appleton Morgan's Study in the Warwickshire Dialect (papers of the New York Shakespeare Society, No. 2, p. 36) it is stated that dout is the Warwickshire, Sussex, Yorkshire, Staffordshire and South Wales dialect word for put out, embarrass, extinguish or cancel. Dout-He douts me-He embarrasses me. The dram of Eale. Doth all the noble substance often doubt. To his own scandal," Hamlet, I., iv. If this is a use of the Warwickshire word, I think this celebrated crux is simplified, viz.: the morsel of evil born in the man embarrasses and extinguishes (or eclipses) all his good points (Eale being a misprint for evil). See use of the word dout in Henry V., IV., ii., 11; and again in Hamlet (Bankside F. 3178); “I have a speech of fire that fain would blaze. But that this folly doubts it." This explanation would leave Mr. Reynolds' difficulty with the last line he cites confined to the "of a;" the safest rule being to take the 1623 text as we find it, and disregard orthography, unless impossible to get a meaning thereby.-[EDS. SHAKESPEARIANA.]

DR. JOHNSON'S OPINION OF SHAKESPEARE.

As an authority about anything, Dr. Samuel Johnson has faded slowly and silently away. His moral essays are dead and forgotten, his Dictionary has been an hundred times superseded, his poetry is unrecognized, his bibliographical and historiographical labors defunct, and the mass of his prefaces, lectures and discourses and dissertations lost. in the dust of generations. But in his own day he held London in a sort of literary fright. He made reputations or shattered them with a bull as ponderous as it was always reckless or partial or bent by his own personal mood or interest at the time. He kept England in a terror as abject as his Dictionary created in the gentle breasts of Becky Sharp's schoolmates. The day of literary despots has passed forever. At this date there could no more be a potentate like Johnson than a kingdom like Dahomey in civilized Europe or America. But, in his own day, no book could live long without the great Doctor's approval, sounded like a trumpet in the Latin-English, which abjectly frightened away a possible rejoinder.

It is nothing, perhaps, to be surprised at, that—when Johnson came to edit Shakespeare, he should have brought to the task the same oracular ponderousness as stood him in stead everywhere else. We must remember that for a century or so it had been the fashion to patronize Shakespeare. Shaftesbury had complained of Shakespeare's "rude and unpolished style and antiquated phrase and wit." Rymer had jeered at his knowledge of decency or propriety. Dryden had placed him "below the dullest writers of our own or any precedent age." Voltaire had called him "a drunken savage." Hume had denied to him "a reasonable propriety of thought;" adding, "It is in vain we look in him for either purity or simplicity of diction. Both he and Ben Jonson were equally deficient in taste and elegance, in harmony and correctness." Denham had declared that Shakespeare was nothing compared with Cowley. Edward Phillipps, the nephew of Milton (in his "Theatrum Poetarum "), pronounced the bard of Avon "the laughter of the critics;" and John Dennis, who was esteemed alternately the rival and equal of Pope in literary judgment, declared that he "set all propriety at defiance, his lines utterly devoid of celestial fire, his verses harsh, unpolished, unmusical." Thus belabored on all sides, poor Shakespeare, perhaps, has cause to be thankful for Johnson's distant though charitable approval. Still, it reads rather queerly to take down Dr. Johnson's own edition of Shakespeare and absorb his commentaries on the Shakespearian text. Let him turn, for example, to where the Doctor says of Hamlet :

"We must allow to the tragedy of Hamlet the praise of variety. The incidents are so numerous that the argument of the play would

make a long tale. The scenes are interchangeably diversified with merriment and solemnity that includes judicious and instructive observations. . New characters appear from time to time in continual succession, exhibiting various forms of life and particular modes of conversation. The pretended madness of Hamlet' causes much mirth .. the catastrophe is not very happily produced; the exchange of weapons is rather an expedient of necessity than a stroke of art. A scheme might easily be found to kill 'Hamlet' with the dagger and 'Laertes' with the bowl."

Again, of Julius Cæsar:

"Of this tragedy many particular passages deserve regard, and the contention and reconcilement of Brutus' and 'Cassius' is universally celebrated. But I have never been strongly agitated in perusing it, and think it somewhat cold and unaffecting, etc."

Of Macbeth the good Doctor loftily approved, but added: "It has no nice discriminations of character. I know not whether it may not be said in some parts which now seem improbable, that in Shakespeare's time it was necessary to warn credulity against vain and illusive predictions." (In which latter sentence we see, for perhaps the first time in criticism, the tendency, which has run to the utmost limits. of crazy imbecility, of assigning ethical or pedagogic purposes to the playwright, who, whatever his results, had no thought but to work up paying theatrical matter for Elizabethan audiences.)

Without pausing to inquire whether Hamlet was a low-comedy part in Johnson's eyes (we know it was not to David Garrick's), or whether the melancholy prince's “pretended madness" caused "much mirth" to the age, or only to Samuel Johnson-(people nowadays do not sit and giggle over "the pretended madness of Hamlet")-let us turn to the Rambler of this excellent lexicographer, and read him, patiently, if we can, citing the magnificent lines

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"Come thick night

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell;
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry hold! hold!'".

as an example of "poetry debased by mean expressions;" because
"dun" is a "low" expression "seldom heard but in the stable;
"knife," an instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest
employment;" and asking "who, without some relaxation of his grav-
ity, can hear of the avengers of guilt peeping through the blanket of
the dark!" Let the reader look on a little farther, and find this
worthy dictionary-maker telling off the spondees and dactyls in the
dramas (to ascertain if the cæsura was exactly in the middle) on his
fingers and thumbs, and counting the unities up to three, to see if he
could approve of what the ages after him were to worship! if, haply,
this Shakespeare (although he might have devised a scheme to kill
Laertes with the bowl and Hamlet with the dagger, or might have
thrown a little more fire into the quarrel with Brutus and Cassius) could

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be admitted to sit at the feet of Addison, with his sleepy and dreary Campaign; or Pope, with his metrical proverbs and icy platitudes. Let him find the old lexicographer admitting, in his gracious condescension, that The Tempest "is sufficiently regular;" of Measure for Measure that "the unities are sufficiently preserved;" that the Midsummer Night's Dream was "well written;" that the style of the Merchant of Venice was easy;' but that in As You Like It "an opportunity of exhibiting a moral lesson" is unhappily lost; the Winter's Tale entertaining; in King John "a pleasing interchange of incidents and characters" (remarking, however, that "the lady's grief is very affecting "); telling us that Troilus and Cressida "is one of the most correctly written of Shakespeare's plays;" of Coriolanus that it "is one of the most amusing;" that Antony and Cleopatra is "low," and "without any art of connection or care of disposition;" dismissing Cymbeline with the remark that he does not care "to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility; upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation; " pleased to commend Romeo and Juliet, because "the incidents are numerous and important, the catastrophe irresistibly affecting, and the process of action carried on with such probability, at least with such congruity to popular opinions, as tragedy requires ;" and while, on the whole, approving of Othello, remarking that "had the scene opened in Cyprus, and the preceding incidents been occasionally related, there had been little wanting to a drama of the most exact and scrupulous regularity." And so on everywhere! Let the reader imagine one thus patronizing these mighty and deathless monographs to-day! and-hold his peace!

But perhaps the strangest of all his dicta anent great Shakespeare is the following, delivered not in print, but ponderously to his biographer, the remarkable Mr. Boswell :

"He again talked of the passage in Congreve with high commendation, and said, 'Shakespeare never has six lines without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion. If I come to an orchard and say, "There's no fruit here," and then comes a poring man who finds two apples and three pears, and tells me, “Sir, you are mistaken, I have found both apples and pears," I should laugh at him.'"

We who have hugged Shakespeare to our hearts in spite of Dr. Johnson, and find in the Elizabethan that summit of eloquence and poetry which the old doctor imagined only himself to occupy, can afford to relish this sort of stuff, and imagine a public that swallowed it for gospel.

But we must admit, while laughing at the criticism, that in politics and social economics Shakespeare and Johnson agreed perfectly. Each was a Tory in the fullest sense the word was ever received. Like Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson's mission was to approve of the present, not to foresee or discount the future; not, as Tennyson puts it, "to break

the dams," but " through the channels of the state " to "convoy the people's (that is the sovereign's) will."

Dr. Johnson was a Tory and a Conservative in politics when politics was on the very eve of progress and reform. He was as blind as Homer himself to anything better than the age he lived in, the civilization in which he moved, and the manners of the town which he thought the highest possible effort in the way of society and of civil institutions. He believed that the head of the state should be a king whose will or whim should be law, and that it was impious to question the existence. of hereditary castes and titles. The institution of classes was divine in his eyes. To those born in a higher class than himself he took off his hat; from those below him he expected the same obeisance. Had the world been filled with such as he, it could never have moved an inch onward or forward. Whatever was, was ordained of Heaven in his eyes, and it was impiety to suggest that anything ought to be improved, superseded, or revised. Whatever in the course of time had passed away, had existed, according to Dr. Johnson, as a model for present imitation, aud conscience was an inward affair to be discreetly kept in tune with whatever happened to come along from the proper sources. When he wrote the parliamentary debates for The Gentleman's Magazine, he "took care that the Whig dogs should always get the worst of it." He hated the sound of the word "pension," but recognized the finger of Providence when a pension happened his own way. It did not seem exactly appropriate to him that a gentleman should be hanged, but when Dr. Dodd was hanged, he expressed his satisfaction that it was done decorously and neatly. Neither Shakespeare nor Johnson was a Lear or a Timon throwing away his substance in silly confidence that anybody receiving it would restore it again on demand. When Johnson wanted a penny or a dinner he expected to render an equivalent, and exacted, as he expected to render, the quid pro quo.

Both the poet and the pundit urged the righteousness of things as they were. Each demanded purple and fine linen as the right of those born to such amenities; and scourges and starvation for those in the walks of life where scourges and starvation abound.