The Learning of Shakespeare.

PART I.-"LESS GREEK."

I HAVE always considered Dr. Farmer's "celebrated Essay," as Steevens calls it, on the learning of Shakespeare, as a piece of pedantic impertinence, not paralleled in literature. The very style and manner in which this third or fourth rate scholar, undistinguished by any work of reputation whatever, speaks of "the old bard," as he usually entitles Shakespeare, are as disgusting as the smirking complacency with which he regards his own petty labors. "The rage of parallelisms," he says in his preface," is almost over; and, in truth, nothing can be more absurd. THIS was stolen from one classic, THAT from another; and, had I not stepped in to his rescue, poor Shakespeare had been stripped as naked of ornament as when he first held horses at the door of the playhouse." His having ever held horses at the door of the playhouse is an idle fiction, which the slightest consideration bestowed on the career of his fortunes in London would suffice to dispel; but it is introduced here to serve the purpose of suggesting to Farmer's readers that the original condition of Shakespeare was menial, and therefore that it is improbable he had received an education fitting him to acquire a knowledge of ancient or foreign learning.

"Had I not come to his rescue," says Dr. Farmer, "poor

Shakespeare would have been stripped bare," &c. Passing the insolence and self-conceit of this assertion, may we not ask from whom was Shakespeare to be rescued? From some zealous commentators, it appears, who indulged in a rage for collecting parallelisms, i. e. passages in the classical authors, in which they thought they found resemblances to passages in Shakespeare. In this task they sometimes were fanciful, and saw likenesses where none existed, but not one of them accused Shakespeare of theft. a thief and an imitator.

There is a vast difference between Who has ever accused Milton or

Virgil of stealing from Homer? Who is so insane as to think that Paradise Lost or the Eneid stands in need of "a rescue" from the annotators who point out the passages of the Iliad, or other poems, from which many of the most beautiful and majestic ornaments of the more modern great epics are derived? Nobody, of the most common sense, can imagine that illustrations of this kind strip the poets naked, or call for the assistance of such rescuers as Farmer.

Elsewhere he says:

"These critics" (those who maintain Shakespeare's claims on learning), "and many others, their coadjutors, have supposed themselves able to trace Shakespeare in the writings of the ancients, and have sometimes persuaded us of their own learning, whatever became of their author's. Plagiarisms have been discovered in every natural description, and every moral sentiment. Indeed, by the kind assistance of the various Excerpta, Sententiæ, and Flores, this business may be effected with very little expense of time or sagacity; as Addison has demonstrated in his comment on Chevy Chase, and Wagstaff on Tom Thumb; and I myself will engage to give you quotations from the elder English writers (for, to own the truth, I was once idle enough to collect such), which shall carry with them at least an equal degree of similarity. But there can be no occasion of wasting any future time in this department; the world is now in possession of marks of imitation."

No doubt the world does possess the work, and equally is it doubtless that the world has totally forgotten the boon. A more worthless piece of trumpery criticism, empty parade, and shallow reading, does not exist than this extolled composition

of Bp. Hurd, therefore it is justly entitled to the laboriously fine compliment here paid it by Farmer.*

* There is one piece of literary imitation or plagiarism, which Hurd would not have remarked, if he had known of its existence. As it is somewhat curious, and as relevant to Shakespeare as at least nine tenths of the commentaries upon him, I extract a notice of it from a literary paper now extinct. [Fraser's Literary Chronicle, p. 265.]

"Steevens remarked, that nothing short of an act of parliament could compel any one to read the sonnets of Shakespeare; a declaration highly to the credit of his taste, and quite decisive as to his capability of properly editing the plays. It is certain, however, that the sonnets are not very generally read, and the same fate has befallen the prose works of Milton. Of this I can not produce a more extraordinary proof than what I find in D'Israeli's Quarrels of Authors. He has been speaking of the celebrated controversy between Warburton and Lowth, and subjoins this note :

"The correct and elegant taste of Lowth, with great humor, detected the wretched taste in which Warburton's prose style was composed; he did nothing more than print the last sentence of the Inquiry on Prodigies in measured lines, without, however, changing the place of a single word, and this produced some of the most turgid blank verse; Lowth describes it as the musa pedestris got on horseback in high prancing style. I shall give a few lines only of the final sentence in this essay :

"Methinks I see her, like the mighty eagle
Renewing her immortal youth, and purging
Her opening sight at the unobstructed beams
Of our benign meridian sun,' &c.

All this will, as many other lines, stand word for word in the original prose of our tasteless writer; but to show his utter want of even one imagination, his translations in imitation of Milton's style, are precisely like this ridiculous prose.'

"We thought that the most famous passage in Milton's most famous English prose work, the Areopagitica, must have been known to all readers of our language: Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: methinks I see her as an eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam, purging and unscaling her longabused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance,' &c., &c.; and yet here we find Warburton pillaging without any acknowledgment, as if he were safe in its obscurity; and the 'correct and elegant' Lowth treating it as wretched, turgid, and inharmonious bombast. Lowth, too, be it remarked, was a grammarian of our language by profession! And to wind up all, here we have Warburton's plagiarism passed unknown, and Lowth's critique adopted with due panegyric, by a painstaking and generally correct ex

It would, indeed, be wandering far away from the question which I intend to discuss, if I were to enter upon the distinction between imitation and plagiarism, or attempt to define the line at which one begins and the other ends; but it is not going out of the way to pronounce the sentences just quoted very absurd. Excerpta, Sententiæ, Flores, will give but little assistance in tracing out imitations; for these compilations are in general nothing more than collections of common-places, which suggest themselves to reflective or poetic minds in all ages and countries pretty much in the same manner. We must adopt a very different course of reading if we wish to show, from the peculiarities of thought or expression which are to be found in one poet, whether he has or has not suggested the phrase or the idea to a successor. When this is judiciously done, it reflects honor on the taste and the reading of the critic. If the execution of such task be ridiculous, as sometimes it will be, the ridicule surely ought to attach to the commentator, not to the author. Shakespeare is not to be esteemed unlearned, because Upton has sometimes been preposterous; and yet that is the argument which runs throughout this "celebrated Essay."

Addison's critique on Chevy Chase, whether intended as jest or earnest, is in neither department very successful. The ballad poetry of England was, in his time, matter of mock to "the town," the sparkish Templar, the wits of the coffeehouses, and the men of mode; and those who, like Thomas Hearne, applied themselves to the antiquities of English literature, were especial butts of scorn. Addison, deeply imbued with this spirit, determined to be patronising at the expense of the old ballad; but not being altogether delivered over to the demon of goût, he could not refrain from expressing, now and then, plorer of our antiquities and our literary history — whose studies have, moreover, led him to the most careful perusal of the literature and politics of the days of Charles I., to which he has devoted so much historical attention.'"-W. M.

genuine admiration of the picturesque touches in Chevy Chase, for some of which he found resemblances in the battle-poems of antiquity. Those resemblances are, in fact, unavoidable; for the poetic incidents of war, either in action or passion, are so few and so prominently striking, that they must occur to every poet, particularly to those who live among the scenes of which they sing; but, on the whole, so little was Addison qualified to perform the task of judging of the merits of the subject he selected for his criticism, that he took as his text, not the real Chevy Chase of Richard Sheale, in the time of Henry VI.—that which stirred the heart of Sir Philip Sidney as with a trumpet-but a modern rifaccimento, made, in all probability, not fifty years before Addison was born, in every respect miserably inferior to the original, and in which are to be found these passages and expressions which excite the merriment of the jocular. He could not have bestowed much attention on our ballad lore, and, consequently, not critically known any thing of its spirit; for if he had, he might have found as well as Hearne, that the true ballad was "The Persé owt of Northumberlande."

As for Wagstaff's Tom Thumb, that is an avowed joke of Addison's critique on Chevy Chase, and in many parts amusingly executed, to the discomfiture of the Spectator. It is full of the then fashionable fooleries about Bentley; and the author, being a medical man, could not avoid having a fling at brother-doctors: it is now hardly remembered.* If, instead of quizzing Addison

*Ex. gr.-"The following Part of this Canto (the old ballad of Tom Thumb) is the Relation of our Hero's being put into a Pudding, and conveyed away in a Tinker's Budget; which is designed by our Author to prove, if it is understood literally, That the greatest Men are subjects of Misfortunes. But it is thought by Dr. B-tly to be all Mythology, and to contain the Doctrine of the Transmutation of Metals, and is designed to shew that all Matter is the same, though differently Modified. He tells me he intends to publish a distinct Treatise on this Canto; and I don't question, but he'll manage the Dispute with the same Learning, Conduct, and good Manners,