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united editors profess, in the title-page, that their copy has been "collated with all the former edi tions." But the duties expected from a collator in their days must have been immaterial indeed. They never turned to the old copies excepting in cases of difficulty, generally contenting themselves with referring to the second folio, and hence they frequently make triumphant assertions of having introduced corrections which they either did not know to be the original text of the oldest copies, (many of which they never saw or heard of,) or which they subsequently found to be so, on recurring to these copies; and then, instead of striking out the note containing their happy conjecture, they suffer it to stand, and inform the readers, with a ludicrous triumph and self-sufficiency, that their critical lucubrations are confirmed by referring to the original copy. The explanation of obsolete

words, and allusions to the customs and manners of the age, in very few instances occupied any portion of their care, and the explanations which do occur are made at random, or by a reference to Cole's or Bailey's dictionaries. They paid little attention to that very necessary duty of an editor, punctuation, leaving it in general in the same state as in the worthless edition of 1711,

from which they printed. But, to use the words of a subsequent commentator," "the most striking and most unfortunate error in Seward's edition is a preposterous affectation of reducing to metre many passages which the author intended for prose. The plan was ill-conceived and miserably executed; it has led the editors into many difficulties, and, instead of adding honour to the poets, has tended to degrade them; for there is a degree of harmony in good prose which bad verse can never arrive at. In pursuing this plan, the editors appear to have laid it down as a principle, that every line is verse which consists precisely of ten syllables. They have accordingly endeavoured, with much perseverance, to range all the words of the passages they want to improve into lines of that length; to effect this purpose, they have used alternately the guillotine and the rack: with the cruelty of Procustes they lop off unmercifully the limbs of some words, whilst they stretch out others beyond their natural dimensions, till they brought them all to the standard required. By these means they have formed a kind of mongrel style, that does not fall under any known description of language; it is neither verse nor prose, but a jumble between

'Mason's Comments, Lond. 1798, 8vo. p. vii.

both, that can lay no just claim to either appellation. They did not consider that dramatic poetry is written to be spoken, not to be told upon the fingers; that it is not so strictly confined by technical rules as some other modes of versification; that a pause in the recital may frequently supply the apparent want of a syllable, and that even the redundancy of a syllable does not necessarily destroy the metre. I cannot indeed suppose that either Shakspeare or Fletcher used to count the syllables in the lines they composed; they appealed to the ear, the true criterion, and if that was satisfied, the line was admitted without a scrutiny. In truth, nothing can be more absurd than the manner in which both the prose and the loose versification of our authors is disfigured in their edition. Their contractions of words and syllables frequently would defy the rough pronunciation of a Pole or Hungarian; while the continual ellipses of vowels, and the strange sequence of consonants, is carried to a degree which exists in none of the living or dead languages."

The late George Colman, who had previously, as we have seen, endeavoured to restore the

"See vol. II. p. 129, and vol. X. p. 5, &c. &c. of the present edition.

fame of our poets by reviving some of their master-pieces on the stage, projected a new edition of their works, with the assistance of several other commentators, amongst whom was the late Isaac Reed, whose notes convey almost the only explanations of obsolete terms and allusions which are to be found in that edition. Mr Colman, whose talents were of a very different and far superior nature to those requisite in an illustrator of ancient poetry, undertook a task to which he was far unequal. He possessed nothing of what has been generally, and very absurdly, termed black-letter knowledge, so essential to a commentator on old plays. He and his unknown associates very anxiously removed the unnecessary and impertinent variations of Theobald, Seward, and Sympson; and they appear to have understood many of the most complicated and involved passages, but they too frequently content themselves with merely saying, “we think the old text right," without furnishing the reader, who cannot be supposed to know their reasons for thinking so, with the requisite explanation and comment. With the exception of the notes of Mr Reed, which occur very sparingly, no attempt is made to clear up the very frequent obsolete phrases and allusions to forgotten customs

and circumstances, of which every reader of old plays cannot be supposed to have made himself a master. The editors have also failed in the profession they make in the title-page, that they had collated the text with all the former editions. They were certainly more careful and diligent than the editors of 1750, but they appear not to have had access to all the old quartos, and they too frequently relax from their diligence, being guilty of gross negligence in many instances. They saw the absurdity of Seward's squaring the prose and metre into lines of ten and eleven syllables, and removed his absurd contractions and impertinent omissions; but here they stopped short, and, instead of restoring many passages and entire scenes to their original prose, they suffered them to remain cut down into lines of a vast variety of dimensions, which are scarcely read with less pain than those of Seward. No attempt was made to collect the scattered information respecting the poets, they, like their predecessors, contenting themselves with re-printing the meagre account of their lives prefixed to the edition published in 1711.

The last attempt to clear up the obscurities in these plays, and to point out and correct the mistakes of former editions, appeared in 1798.