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-Street.

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 COM

MENTATORS.

FARMER.

OBSERVATIONS.

TEMPEST.] The Tempest aud The Midsummer Night's Dream, are the noblest efforts of that sublime and amazing imagination peculiar to Shakespeare, which soars above the bounds of nature, without forsaking sense; or, more properly, carries nature along with him beyond her established limits. Fletcher seems particularly to have admired these two plays, and hath wrote two in imitation of them, The Sea Voyage, and The Faithful Shepherdess. But when he presumes to break a lance with Shakespeare, and write in emulation of him, as he does in The False One, which is the rival of Antony and Cleopatra, he is not so successful. After him, Sir John Suckling and Milton catched the brightest fire of their imagination from these two plays; which shines fantastically indeed in The Goblins, but much more nobly and serenely in The Mask at Ludlow Castle. WARBURTON.

No one has hitherto been lucky enough to discover the romance on which Shakespeare may be supposed to have founded this play, the beauties of which could not secure it from the criticism of Ben Jonson, whose malignity appears to have been more than equal to his

wit. In the introduction to Bartholomew Fair, he says: "If there be never a servant monster in the fair, who can help it, he says, nor a nest of antiques? He' is loth to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries." STEEVENS.

I was informed by the late Mr. Collins of Chichester, that Shakespeare's Tempest, for which no origin is yet assigned, was formed on a romance called Aurelio and Isabella, printed in Italian, Spanish, French, and English, in 1588. But though this information has not proved true on examination, an useful conclusion may be drawn from it, that Shakespeare's story is somewhere to be found in an Italian novel, at least that the story preceded Shakespeare. Mr. Collins had searched this subject with no less