NOTES.

NOTE 1. Page 148.

Charles I., for example, when Prince of Wales, and many others in his father's court, gained their known familiarity with Shakspeare — not through the original quartos, so slenderly diffused, nor through the first folio of 1623, but through the court representations of his chief dramas at Whitehall.

NOTE 2. Page 154.

The Canterbury Tales were not made public until 1380 or thereabouts: but the composition must have cost thirty or more years; not to mention that the work had probably been finished for some years before it was divulged.

NOTE 3. Page 156.

The reason why the broad distinctions between the two literatures of power and knowledge so little fix the attention, lies in the fact, that a vast proportion of books — history, biography, travels, miscellaneous essays, &c., lying in a middle zone, confound these distinctions by interblending them. All that we call 'amusement' or 'entertainment,' is a diluted form of the power belonging to passion, and also a mixed form; and where threads of direct instruction intermingle in the texture with these threads of power, this absorption of the duality into one representative nuance

neutralizes the separate perception of either. Fused into a tertium quid, or neutral state, they disappear to the popular eye as the repelling forces, which in fact they are.

NOTE 4. Page 160.

And this purity of diction shows itself in many points arguing great vigilance of attention, and also great anxiety for using the language powerfully as the most venerable of traditions, when treating the most venerable of subjects. For instance, the Bible never condescends to the mean colloquial preterites of chid for did chide, or writ for did write, but always uses the full-dress word chode, and wrote. Pope might have been happier had he read his Bible more: but assuredly he would have improved his English. A question naturally arises — how it was that the elder writers - Shakspeare in particular, (who had seen so little of higher society when he wrote his youthful poems of Lucrece and Adonis,) should have maintained so much purer a grammar? Dr. Johnson indeed, but most falsely, says that Shakspeare's grammar is licentious. 'The style of Shakspeare' (these are the exact words of the Doctor in his preface) 'was in itself ungrammatical, perplexed, and obscure.' An audacious misrepresentation! In the doctor himself, a legislator for the language, we undertake to show more numerically of trespasses against grammar, but (which is worse still) more unscholarlike trespasses. Shakspeare is singularly correct in grammar. One reason, we believe, was this: from the restoration of Charles II. decayed the ceremonious exteriors of society. Stiffness and reserve melted away before the familiarity and impudence of French manners. Social meetings grew far more numerous as towns expanded; social pleasure far more began now to depend upon conversation; and conversation, growing less formal, quickened its pace. Hence came the call for rapid abbreviations: the 'tis and 'twas, the can't and don't of the two post-Miltonic generations arose under this impulse; and the general impression has ever since subsisted amongst English writers-that language, instead of being an exquisitely beautiful vehicle for the

thoughts a robe that never can be adorned with too much care or piety is in fact a dirty high-road which all people detest whilst all are forced to use it, and to the keeping of which in repair no rational man ever contributes a trifle that is not forced from him by some severity of Quarter Sessions. The great corrupter of English was the conversational instinct for rapidity. A more honorable source of corruption lay in the growth of new ideas, and the continual influx of foreign words to meet them. Spanish words arose, like reformado, prixado, desperado, and French ones past counting. But as these retained their foreign forms of structure, they reacted to vitiate the language still more by introducing a piebald aspect of books which it seemed a matter of necessity to tolerate for the interests of wider thinking. The perfection of this horror was never attained except amongst the Germans.

NOTE 5. Page 168.

It was after his connection with Warburton that Pope introduced several of his living portraits into the Satires.

NOTE 6. Page 172.

By what might seem a strange oversight, but which in fact is a very natural oversight to one who was not uttering one word in which he seriously believed, Pope, in a prose note on verse 207, roundly asserts that the particular characters of women are more various than those of men.' It is no evasion of this insufferable contradiction, that he couples with the greater variety of characters in women a greater uniformity in what he presumes to be their ruling passion. Even as to this ruling passion he cannot agree with himself for ten minutes; generally he says, that it is the love of pleasure; but sometimes (as at verse 208) forgetting this monotony, he ascribes to women a dualism of passions - love of pleasure and love of power which dualism of itself must be a source of selfconflict, and therefore of inexhaustible variety in character:

'Those only fix'd, they first or last obey

The love of pleasure and the love of sway.'

NOTE 7. Page 175.

This refers to the Act of Parliament for burying corpses in woollen, which greatly disturbed the fashionable costume in coffins comme il faut.

NOTE 7. Page 177.

The sons of the Duke having died, the title and estates were so settled as to descend through this daughter, who married the Earl of Sunderland. In consequence of this arrangement, Spenser (until lately) displaced the great name of Churchill ; and the Earl became that second Duke of Marlborough, about whom Smollett tells us in his History of England (Reign of George II.) so remarkable and to this hour so mysterious a story.

NOTE 8. Page 177.

The Duchess died in the same year as Pope, viz. just in time by a few months to miss the Rebellion of 1745, and the second Pretender; spectacles which for little reasons (vindictive or otherwise) both of them would have enjoyed until the spring of 1746.

NOTE 9. Page 186.

The Vestals not only renounced marriage, at least for those years in which marriage could be a natural blessing, but also left their fathers' houses at an age the most trying to the human heart as regards the pangs of separation.

NOTE 10. Page 200.

We do not include the DUNCIAD in this list. On the contrary, the arguments by which it has been generally undervalued, as though antiquated by lapse of time and by the fading of names, are all unsound. We ourselves hold it to be the greatest of Pope's efforts. But for that very reason we retire from the examination of it, which we had designed, as being wholly disproportioned to the narrow limits remaining to us.

WILLIAM GODWIN.*

It is no duty of a notice so cursory, to discuss Mr. Godwin as a philosopher. Mr. Gilfillan admits, that in this character he did not earn much popularity by any absolute originality; and of such popularity as he may have snatched surreptitiously without it, clearly all must have long since exhaled before it could be possible for a respectable person' to demand of Mr. Gilfillan Who's Godwin?' A question which Mr. Gilfillan justly thinks it possible that 'some readers,' of the present day, November, 1845, may repeat. That is, we must presume, not who is Godwin the novelist ? but who is Godwin the political philosopher? In that character he is now forgotten. And yet in that he carried one single shock into the bosom of English society, fearful but momentary, like that from the electric blow of the gymnotus; or, perhaps, the intensity of the brief panic which, fifty years ago, he impressed on the public mind, may be more adequately expressed by the case of a ship in the middle ocean suddenly scraping, with her keel, a rag

*A Gallery of Literary Portraits.' By George Gilfillan.