in the harmony with the sense and feeling? Some word or words must have slipped out after "youth,"-possibly "and see" “That should'st repair my youth!—and see, thou heap'st," &c. Ib. sc. 3. Pisanio's speech :— But "this eye," in spite of the supposition of its being used SEKTIK@s, is very awkward. I should think that either " or" or 66 the" was Shake speare's word; "As he could make me or with eye or ear." Ib. sc. 6. Iachimo's speech :-— "Hath nature given them eyes To see this vaulted arch, and the rich crop I would suggest "cope" for "crop." As to "twinn'd stones"-may it not be a bold catachresis for muscles, cockles, and other empty shells with hinges, which are truly twinned? ` I would take Dr. Farmer's "umber'd," which I had proposed before I ever heard of its having been already offered by him: but I do not adopt his interpretation of the word, which I think is not derived from umbra, a shade, but from umber, a dingy yellow-brown soil, which most commonly forms the mass of the sludge on the sea-shore, and on the banks of tide-rivers at low water. One other possible interpretation of this sentence has occurred to me, just barely worth mentioning; that the "twinn'd stones" are the augrim stones upon the number'd beech,-that is, the astronomical tables of beech-wood. Act v. sc. 5. "Sooth. When, as a lion's whelp," &c. It is not easy to conjecture why Shakespeare should have introduced this ludicrous scroll, which answers no one purpose, either propulsive, or explicatory, unless as a joke on etymology. "TITUS ANDRONICUS." ACT I. sc. 1. Theobald's note: "I never heard it so much as intimated, that he (Shakespeare) had turned his genius to stage-writing, before he associated with the players, and became one of their body." THAT AT Shakespeare never "turned his genius to stage-writing," as Theobald most Theobaldice phrases it, before he became an actor, is an assertion of about as much authority as the precious story that he left Stratford for deer-stealing, and that he lived by holding gentlemen's horses at the doors of the theatre, and other trash of that archgossip, old Aubrey. The metre is an argument against Titus Andronicus being Shakespeare's, worth a score such chronological surmises. Yet I incline to think that both in this play and in Jeronymo, Shakespeare wrote some passages, and that they are the earliest of his compositions. Act v. sc. 2. I think it not improbable that the lines from I am not mad; I know thee well enough; So thou destroy Rapine, and Murder there " were written by Shakespeare in his earliest period. But instead of the text "Revenge, which makes the foul offenders quake. Tit. Art thou Revenge? and art thou sent to me?" the words in italics ought to be omitted. "TROILUS AND CRESSIDA." "Mr. Pope (after Dryden) informs us that the story of Troilus and Cressida was originally the work of one Lollius, a Lombard: but Dryden goes yet further; he declares it to have been written in Latin verse, and that Chaucer translated it. Lollius was a historiographer of Urbino in Italy.”—Note in Stockdale's edition, 1807. "L OLLIUS was a historiographer of Urbino in Italy." So affirms the notary to whom the Sieur Stockdale committed the disfaciménto of Ayscough's excellent edition of Shakespeare. Pity that the researchful notary has not either told us in what century, and of what history, he was a writer, or been simply content to depose, that Lollius, if a writer of that name existed at all, was a somewhat somewhere. The notary speaks of the Troy Boke of Lydgate, printed in 1513. I have never seen it; but I deeply regret that Chalmers did not substitute the whole of Lydgate's works from the MSS. extant, for the almost worthless Gower. The Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare can scarcely be classed with his dramas of Greek and Roman history; but it forms an intermediate link between the fictitious Greek and Roman histories, which we may call legendary dramas, and the proper ancient histories,-that is, between the Pericles or Titus Andronicus, and the Coriolanus or Julius Cæsar. Cymbeline is a congener with Pericles, and distinguished from Lear by not having any declared prominent object. But where |