He who the sword of Heaven would bear Must be as holy as severe.

And we must be very sure that the passage is corrupt before we set about amending it. First and last, we must remember that primal elder law, that of two readings the more difficult is to be preferred. Durior lectio preferenda 'st should be a frontlet between our brows. The weaker reading or the plainer meaning is more likely to be a printer's interpretation of what he failed to comprehend.

But to understand Shakespeare's meaning in a degree that will authorize us to amend the text, we must understand Shakespeare's speech; that is, we must be thoroughly familiar with the words and usages of Elizabethan English; and not only with Elizabethan words and phrases, but also, as far as possible, with the very pronunciation.

This fundamental principle is well enforced and illustrated in Dr. Ingleby's book, which was originally published in one of the Annuals of the German Shakespeare Society under the title of The Still Lion, a title suggested by a passage in De Quincey, where the danger of meddling with Milton's text is compared to that of meddling with a still lion, which may be neither dead nor sleeping, but merely shamming. Dr. Ingleby substitutes Shakespeare for Milton, and maintains that the mass of Shakespearian emendations that have been proposed during the last twenty years are needless; and that corruptions have been assumed where none exist, owing to the limited knowledge possessed by the critics. Thus, for instance, in the Comedy of Errors (I. i. 152) the Duke bids Aegeon to "seek thy help by beneficial help." At once there is a chorus from all of us, sciolists, of "Corruption!" "Sophistication!" "Cacophonous repetition!" etc. etc. "But gently, friends," says Dr. Ingleby: "may not 'help' have borne a different or a special meaning in Elizabethan English?" and turning to medical writers and books on medicine of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (among them Dr. John Hall, Shakespeare's own son-in-law), he proves that heal and help having a common origin, help was used by Shakespeare's contemporaries as a synonym for cure, deliverance. The text, then, is perfectly correct, AEgeon being bid to seek his deliverance from the doom of death by the help of what friends he can find. The lion's slumbers were here of the lightest, and happy men be our dole to have escaped with whole skins. Thus Dr. Ingleby takes up passage after passage of Shakespeare that has been pronounced corrupt, and shows that the fault imputed to it lies not in the text, but in the lack of requisite knowledge, be it of language, of usage, of manners and customs, or even of Elizabethan spelling and grammar, on the part of the critic. The mischief that ignorance has done in the past is irrevocable, but such impressive warnings as Dr. Ingleby gives us may help, in both senses of the word, in the future. We may be spared, hereafter, the infliction of numberless "felicitous" conjectures, on which the following is scarcely a parody. It was proposed many years ago in sport by the late deeply-lamented Chauncey Wright, and, as far as we know, has never yet appeared in print, though it may live to be gravely noted down in some future Variorum, being a genuine echo of many a note by Zachary Jackson or Andrew Beckett. In As You Like It occur the familiar lines, "And thus our life ... finds ... books in the running brooks, sermons in stones," etc. "This is stark nonsense, and must be remedied. Who ever found a book in a rivulet or a sermon in a rock? It is clearly an error of a most ignorant or careless compositor, who has transposed the nouns. Read, 'stones in the running brooks and sermons in books.' Sense is vindicated. Stones are frequently found in brooks. David chose smooth pebbles from the brook, and sermons are quite frequently printed and sold in a book-form. By this restoration Shakespeare's wonderful observation is," etc., etc., etc.

Great as is the service done in particular cases, the most valuable part of The Still Lion is the moral which it points, that "successful emendation is the fruit of severe study and research on the one hand, and of rare sensibility and sense on the other." And in our opinion Dr. Ingleby might have gone even farther, and demanded for it a spark of that creative power which is genius. But it must not be inferred that all the difficult passages in Shakespeare can be thus explained away. Despite all learning, or acuteness, or genius, there remains a considerable number that have never yet been solved, and never will be, in general acceptation, till the crack of doom. These, however, bear so small a proportion to the vast mass of perplexing riddles that have been satisfactorily settled that, like an infinitely small quantity in mathematics, they may be neglected. Therefore, let not him who wishes to read his Shakespeare unalloyed by notes and textual comment, despise the painful critic or accuse him of playing at loggats with the words of Shakespeare. It is through the labors of critics that the text is in such a shape that the work-a-day reader can read it at all. In the Folios and Quartos we see Shakespeare as through a glass darkly, but, thanks to those drudges, the commentators, in numberless places we can now see him face to face.

The Orphan of Pimlico, and other Sketches, Fragments and Drawings. By William Makepeace Thackeray. With some notes by Anne Isabella Thackeray. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.

The artistic sense—the vivid conception of things and persons in their external aspects and with a constant regard to their groupings and the effect upon the spectator—made itself peculiarly prominent in all that Thackeray wrote. It is not that he gives us elaborate descriptions: this, indeed, is the resource of writers who are lacking in the faculty mentioned, and are consequently obliged to reach the result, if at all, by inferior means. His power lay in the selection of traits which were strictly characteristic, in making every act or phrase indicative of individuality. An astute critic, therefore—one gifted with that keenness of vision to which the exercise of the office unhappily implies a claim—should have been able to infer Thackeray's dexterity with the pencil from the methods of his literary work. There was, however, no room for conjecture on this point, as the fact was early a matter of notoriety, and many of the illustrations in his books were known to be from his own sketches. Recently, too, a publication containing some of his earliest and slightest work in this way attracted considerable attention, with the fortunate result of calling out the volume before us, which embodies the best specimens of his skill reproduced by a method that renders every line an exact transcript, and accompanied by facsimiles of whatever written text or comment appeared on the same page. Many of them partake more or less of the nature of caricature, and if the execution alone be considered, they show that Thackeray might, in default of talents of a different order, have pursued this line with as much success as some of its cleverest cultivators. But what distinguishes the drolleries in this book is the inventiveness shown in the conception and the characteristic ingenuity of the details. The designs for "Playing Cards," in which the tray of spades is represented by the figures of Johnson, Boswell and Gibbon, and a scene at "Dr. Birch's School" does duty for the seven of hearts, are especially felicitous in this way; while a different but not less familiar trait is exhibited in some carefully-drawn "Initial Letters," embodying charming bits of child-life and quaint allusions to well-known scenes in history and romance. "Othello" in the form of "Dandy Jim of Souf Caroline," and "The Little Assessor of Tuebingen"—a mysterious personage of whom the author refused to reveal the secret—are equally amusing and suggestive. There are some half hundred subjects of the same or other kinds in the volume, which, as a mere picture-book, is full of entertainment for readers of all ages, while for those with whom the name of Thackeray is a dear household word it will have a still higher charm, calling up as it does so many associations connected with the author and the man, and seeming like a fragment of the biography which has been vainly looked for.



BOOKS RECEIVED.

The Illustrated Annual Register of Rural Affairs for 1876. By J.J. Thomas. Albany: Luther Tucker & Son.

The Chevalier Casse-Cou: The Red Camellia. By Fortune Du Boisgobey. Translated from the French by Thos. Picton. New York: Robert M. De Witt.

Household Elegancies. By Mrs. C.S. Jones and Henry T. Williams. New York: Henry T. Williams.

The Children's Treasury of English Song. By Francis Turner Palgrave. New York: Macmillan & Co.

Stories from the Lips of the Teacher. By O.B. Frothingham. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Songs of Three Centuries. Edited by J.G. Whittier. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

Roddy's Reality. By Helen Kendrick Johnson. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

THE END