P. 238. With hand armipotent.-The old copies have armenypotent and armenipotent.

ACT V., SCENE 2.

P. 245. She comes: pray, humour her. - The old copies have honour.

P. 248. Jailer. O, sir, you'd fain be nibbling. Weber. The old copies prefix “Daugh.”

So Seward and

ACT V., SCENE 3.

P. 250.

Each stroke laments

The place whereon it falls, and sounds more like

It is enough, my hearing shall be punish'd

With what shall happen, 'gainst the which there is

No deafing; but I dare not taint mine eye

With dread sights it may shun. - In the third of these lines, I A bell than like a blade." In the sixth, the suspect we ought to read " old copies have to heare instead of I dare. With to hear, I can make no sense at all out of the passage; and that were an easy misprint for I dare.

P. 251. You are the victor's meed, the price and garland

To crown the questant's title. Instead of questant's, the old

copies have Questions.

P. 252.

Those darker humours that

Stick misbecomingly on others, on him

Live in fair dwelling.-The old copies have them instead of him.

P. 253. Upon my right side still I wore thy picture,
Palamon's on the left: why so, I know not;

I had no end in't; chance would have it so. - The old copies read "I had no end in't else." This is indeed a Fletcherian idiom; but the present scene clearly is not Fletcher's; and Melpomene, Thalia, and all the other Muses forbid that such a blot in rhythm and sense should be imputed to Shakespeare! Seward omits else.

ACT V., SCENE 4.

P. 258. Arise, great sir, and give the tidings ear

-

That are most dearly sweet and bitter. — The old copies have early instead of dearly. Corrected by Seward.

P. 259. Forgets school-doing, being therein train'd,

And of kind manage; then pig-like he whines

At the sharp rowel, &c. — The old copies lack then.

P. 260. When neither curb would crack, girth break, nor differing plunges

Disroot his rider whence he grew, but that

He kept him 'tween his legs, on his hind hoofs
Quickly uprearing, so on end he stands,

That Arcite's legs, &c. -The words Quickly uprearing, so are not in the old copies. The quarto gives the third and fourth lines thus:

He kept him tweene his legges, on his hind hoofes

on end he stands.

Hence Weber concludes, as he well may, that "the first part of the second line was omitted by the compositor, being illegible in the manuscript." I think the sense of uprearing is fairly required'; and we must suppose the movement of the horse to have been sudden, else the rider would have extricated himself from the saddle, and kept his upright posture.

P. 260.

Acknowledge to the gods

Your thanks that you are living. — The old copies have Our instead of Your.

VENUS AND ADONIS.

E

`NTERED at the Stationers' on the 18th of April, 1593, by Richard Field, as his copy, licensed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Wardens." The poem was published by Field in the course of the same year; also a second time in 1594. The third edition was issued by John Harrison in 1596; the fourth, in 1600, by the same publisher; the fifth, by William Leake, 1602. After this time, it was often reprinted, and copies are known, bearing the dates of 1616 and 1620.

This frequency of publication sufficiently attests the great popularity of the poem. It is often alluded to, also, by the Poet's contemporaries, and in such terms as show it to have been a general favourite. Meres, in his Wit's Treasury, 1598, speaks of it thus: As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare: witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends."

The tenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, as translated by Arthur Golding, probably furnished Shakespeare the story of Venus and Adonis. Golding's translation was first published complete in 1567, and reissued in 1572, 1584, 1587, and 1593; so that it must have had a large circulation when the poem was written.

In the dedication of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare speaks of it as "the first heir of my invention"; yet he had then become so distinguished in the Drama as to be squibbed by Robert Greene, and patronized by the Earl of Southampton. A part of Greene's squib is quoted in the Life of the Poet, vol. i. page 25. Whether Shakespeare dated the heirship of his poem from the time of writing or of publishing, is uncertain: probably the former; and if so, then of course it must have been written several years before 1593. The general opinion refers the composition

of the poem to the period before he left Stratford; but this is a point on which we are without evidence of any sort either way.

The merit of Venus and Adonis, and indeed of the author's poems generally, sinks into littleness beside that of his dramas. We have already seen how great was its contemporary popularity. This excessive applause was followed by a long period of undue neglect or depreciation; but in later times the fashion has rather been to overpraise it. The poem abounds, indeed, in verbal and fantastical tricks and antics caught from the taste and custom of the age often it may be said of the author, that he appears "singling out the difficulties of the art, to make an exhibition of his strength and skill in wrestling with them." But what fulness of life and spirit there is in it! what richness and delicacy of imagery! what fresh, and airy, and subtile turns of invention and combination! Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, has the following remarks upon it:

"In the Venus and Adonis, the first and most obvious excellence is the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant. The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in the compositions of a young man. The man that hath no music in his soul' can indeed never be a genuine poet. Imagery; affecting incidents; just thoughts; interesting personal or domestic feelings; and with these the art of their combination or intertexture in the form of a poem; may all, by incessant effort, be acquired as a trade, by a man of talents and much reading, who has mistaken an intense desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius. But the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination; and this, together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learnt. It is in this sense that Poeta nascitur, non fit."