subject no where inspires him, except when he is dilating on the character of Falstaff.

Johnson was assisted by Steevens, in the publication of another edition of Shakspeare in 1773, in ten octavo volumes; the result of their joint labours was a new publication of the same number of volumes in 1778; and a third edition, bearing the names Johnson and Steevens, appeared, under the superintendence of Isaac Reed, in 1785.

There is no necessity for me to notice at any length Capell's edition, in ten crown-octavo volumes, in 1768, for the work is more remarkable for typographical beauty than critical merit; and I pass on at once to the names of Steevens and Malone.

Steevens commenced his career of labour in the cause of Shakspeare in 1766, by superintending the reprint of such of the dramatist's plays as had made their appearance in quarto, and preparing a list, to accompany them, of the various readings of the different quarto editions of each play. Where the dissimilarity between the early and later editions was so great, as to create a suspicion that the former was a first draft which the author afterwards. expanded, Mr. Steevens printed the first as well as the subsequent copy, conceiving that there were many persons,

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who, not contented with the possession of a finished picture of some great master, would be desirous to procure the first sketch that was made for it, that they might have the pleasure of tracing the progress of the artist from the first colouring to the finishing stroke."

Steevens subsequently assisted Johnson, but in 1793 he appeared as an independent editor of Shakspeare, though he affixed to his work the name of his former coadjutor, being unable, as he says with modesty and beauty, "to forego an additional opportunity of recording in a title page that he had once the honour of being united in a task of literature with Dr. Samuel Johnson." This was the last edition of Shakspeare of which Steevens superintended the publication, but his attention to a subject which employed so many years of his life did not relax, and previous to his death, in 1800, he had prepared another edition in twenty-one volumes, on which Mr. Isaac Reed bestowed his attention in its passage through the press in 1803.

In the course of his Shakspearean labours, Steevens received many valuable communications from Malone; who, in 1780, added to Steevens' second edition two supplementary volumes, containing Shakspeare's Poems, the seven spurious plays ascribed to him by the third folio, and

additional notes on the poet's genuine plays. To Reed's edition of Johnson and Steevens he contributed some notes also, which occasionally controverted Steevens' opinions, and, in 1790, printed an entire and independent edition of Shakspeare in ten octavo volumes.

Malone's industry did not forsake him here, for he employed himself up to the hour of his death in 1812, in the preparation of an improved edition of the poet. The materials he collected were arranged and published by Boswell, as a second edition of Malone's Shakspeare, in twenty-one octavo volumes, in 1821.

Steevens was a wit, a scholar, and a man of taste. He was deeply read in the literature of Shakspeare's age, and explained with skill many of the local allusions of his author. But Steevens was no poet, and he could not, therefore, comment on the deep pathos and lofty imaginings of Shakspeare. His want of poetic feeling diminished even his philological merits. He often rejected readings both of the quartos and the folios for the adoption of others which harmonised, as he thought, a line previously halting in the measure. He loved only the artificial and stately march of epic verse, and 'wood notes wild' whispered no charm to his ear.

As a philologist Malone is a much safer guide. His first principle was a rigid adherence to the elder copies, and when any intelligible meaning was to be extracted from those sources, he professed never to admit into his page a reading unauthorised by the earliest quarto extant, where the play had been published in quarto, or by the first folio, when the play had originally made its appearance there; and on no occasion whatever did he adopt a reading unsanctioned by authority without apprising his reader of the liberty he had taken.

Malone, like Steevens, was destitute of poetic feeling, and he had not the wit and taste of his rival. In knowledge they were equals. Steevens had his acquirements at his free and immediate command. He applies them on all occasions with perfect facility, unencumbered by their bulk, and unconfused by their desultoriness. His vivacity frolicks beneath the trammels of the most uninteresting minutiæ, and his wit enlivens the reader's passage through the dreary paths of black letter quotation. But discretion did not always guide him in the exercise of hist wit, and his love of minutia was not always harmless. He often wrote notes as traps to entangle his fellow labourers in error, and insure

himself a triumph in confuting them; and his. illustrations of passages the most disgusting are remarkable for their elaborateness. It aggravates his crime that he shrunk from responsibility, and sought refuge from reprobation and disgrace, under the borrowed names of Collins and of Anmer.*

The hostility in which Steevens and Malone continually appear in their notes, forces them into comparison with each other. Malone, unlike Steevens, always appears oppressed by his acquisitions, and all he accomplished, he accomplished with effort. He wanted judgment to direct him in the distinction of great from little things; all matters were, in his estimation, equally important; he bestows as many words on a trivial subject as on one of real consequence. Steevens' intellectual powers were certainly superior to Malone's, but Steevens' unsound principles of criticism, and dubious honesty, weigh heavily against him. Malone's strict adherence to the dry canons of criticism is an ad

* Steevens has lately been completely unmasked by two writers: Miss Hawkins, in her book of anecdotes; and more skilfully by D' Israeli in his paper on "Puck the Commentator," in the second series of the Literature.

Curiosities of