seems to have taken entire possession of him, and he shows a decided partiality for the East. Soon after his return from his first travels, he was almost tempted to proceed thither again, and seems to have been disappointed at not being appointed "Catholic Cosmographer" of the pope, as a reward for his previous exertions, which attracted so much notice at the court of France, that he was sent for to relate them before the king, and received his royal commands to publish them. The first edition was printed in 1652; the second, which is the one before us, appeared in 1657, and is stated to have been revised and enlarged. It became no doubt a book of popular reading, as its author has contrived to include in it accounts of the government and religion, as well as of the manners, of most of the principal kingdoms in the world as then known. Subsequently to the appearance of his work, he proceeded again to the East, and we are informed that he died in Persia about the year 1668.

ART. VII.-The First Edition of Shakespeare.

MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, published according to the true Originall Copies. London: Printed by Isaac

Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623. (The first folio edition.) THE publishers of the seventeenth century are not always to be

depended upon in their statements respecting the authenticity of the sources whence they obtained their texts; but a careful examination of the circumstances under which the first edition of Shakespeare appeared, would lead us to believe that the assertion, they were "published according to the true originall copies," is strictly correct. The work appeared under the care of Heminge and Condell, two of the poet's most intimate friends; and their 'Address to the great variety of Readers' is in a tone of serious truth, not, as is too frequently the case in books of the period, in one of exaggerated adulation. "It had been a thing," they observe, "worthy to have been wished, that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings; but since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their care and pain to have collected and published them; and so to have published them, as where before you were abused with divers stolen and surrep

titious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them, even those are now offered to your view cured, and perfect of their limbs; and all the rest absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them." It is quite clear from this that Heminge and Condell professed to print an authentic edition,— the first having any real claims to authenticity; and as this longvaunted "first folio" is talked of more than read, and is daily increasing in an extravagant price, it may not be without its use to offer to our readers a few observations on the chief points in which its value really consists.

There can be little doubt that many of the plays in the first folio were printed from Shakespeare's own manuscripts, for the editors assert this; and the general statement of the clearness of the poet's manuscripts, is in some measure confirmed by Ben Jonson. Of the thirty-six plays contained in this volume, exactly one half had never previously been published in any form whatever, and four had only appeared in a very obscure and mutilated condition; so that to twenty-two out of thirty-six plays, the disputed question respecting the difference in value between the quarto and folio editions, does not apply. This circumstance alone imparts an extraordinary and inestimable value to this volume. In it are unquestionably preserved the only original copies, from Shakespeare's own manuscripts, of twenty-two of his plays. The following tabular statement will enable the reader to see precisely the earliest authorities for each play :

With the exception, therefore, of fourteen plays, for 'Pericles,' not being inserted in the folio till 1664, need scarcely enter into our present consideration, the first edition of Shakespeare of 1623 is our only real authority for the poet's text. With respect to these fourteen, various circumstances must determine how far reliance may be placed upon them; but recollecting that, even if any of the quartos were used in the preparation of the folio, they had most probably received authorised corrections, we should incline, in nearly every instance, to prefer the authority of the latter. A great deal of license in unobjectionable readings, in cases where authentic quartos and the folio differ, must necessarily be left to the particular editor; but we cannot help thinking that Mr. Knight has pursued the wisest course in closely following Heminge and Condell's edition. Horne Tooke's opinion on this subject deserves to be of weight, for he had closely studied the grammatical character of Shakespeare's English, and could speak with confidence on what was the most likely to be a genuine text. "The first folio, in my opinion," observes that eminent critic, "is the only edition worth regarding; and it is much to be wished that an edition of Shakespeare were given literatim according to the first folio, which is now become so scarce and dear that few persons can obtain it; for by the presumptuous license of the dwarfish commentators, who are for ever cutting him down to their own size, we must risk the loss of Shakespeare's genuine text, which that folio assuredly contains; notwithstanding some few slight errors of the press, which might be noted without altering."

Heavy, indeed, will be his responsibility who shall venture to

depart widely from this grand foundation of the genuine text of Shakespeare. Even the editor of the second folio, which was published nine years afterwards, so far from improving the text by reference to the original manuscripts, merely corrected obvious. typographical blunders, and committed unnecessary alterations, which bore in themselves the marks of spuriousness by being adapted to the changes which had occurred in the construction of the English language after the poet's death. This is a consideration which should never be lost sight of; for however agreeable may certain ingenious alterations and "improvements" be to modern ears, it is an editor's duty to give to the world what Shakespeare wrote in the diction of his own time, not what he would have written had he been contemporary with Dryden, or had lived amongst ourselves. In the latter case, instead of writing plays, he would perhaps have astonished the world by some brilliant essays in the Quarterly, or controlled the political destinies of the day by gentle thunders in The Times.' The present is not the day for play writing.

The folio edition is sometimes, however, corrected in the minor points by the earlier quartos, and, as whatever appeared in the poet's lifetime must be consonant with the grammatical phraseology of the period, even independently of their authority, such corrections are deserving of the greatest consideration. All corrections, however, appearing in any form after the appearance of the folio of 1623, unless found in copies guaranteed to have been taken from authentic manuscripts, must be looked upon as purely conjectural; and the more we examine into the minutiae of Shakespearian literature, the more reason we shall find for distrusting nearly all conjectural readings. A line from a contemporary poct will often dissipate pages of learning and lines of ingenious emendation, which, in the singular words of Dr. Johnson, "almost place the critic on a level with the author." Amongst many instances which occur to us, illustrating this remark, may be mentioned a new reading in a well-known passage in Hamlet'

"I am thy father's spirit;

Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin'd to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes, done in my days of nature,
Are burnt and purg'd away."

It is now proposed to read lasting fires, a reading which, however ingenious, destroys the allusion to the old notion that one of the

miseries of hell and purgatory was the want of food, or, as Chaucer has it, "defaute of mete and drinke."

To take another example in the same play, in the second scene of the first act :

"He

may not, as unvalued persons do,

Carve for himself; for on his choice depends
The safety and the health of the whole state;
And therefore must his voice be circumscrib'd
Unto the voice and yielding of that body,
Whereof he is the head."

One would have thought there was little occasion for the exercise of any critical ingenuity here, but we are mistaken. A critic considers carve for himself, to be "a coarse, if not an unmeaning expression; we may easily read, and even with some degree of elegance and force, crave, i. e., sue for himself!" This, however, is a mere trifle to a perpetration in Othello,' where Desdemona unfortunately says

"Beshrew me much, Emilia,

I was, unhandsome warrior as I am,

Arraigning his unkindness with my soul;

But now I find I had suborn'd the witness,
And he's indited falsely."

"Unhandsome warrior," says the critic, should surely be unhandsome lawyer, or pleader; for " lawyer and warrior being somewhat alike in sound, the mistake was made in transcribing!"

Some of the critics have a marvellous idea of the poet's metre, as may be witnessed in the following undeniable prosaic marring of one of the most characteristic scenes in 'Macbeth:'

The Frenchman sadly wanted to know what the witch was going to do,-" I'll do, I'll do, I'll do-vel, vat vill she do?" The English emendator has settled the question about as satisfactorily as the scholar answered one respecting the number of people who were drowned in an excursion somewhere near our own Alma Mater

"Omnes drownderunt, qui swimaway non potuerunt!"

We cannot resist another specimen from the same play, though we fear the consequences of its disclosure on Mr. Macready, whose impressive reading of the lines must be in the recollection of most of our readers :

"This supernatural soliciting

Cannot be ill; cannot be good."