KING LEAR.

Page 525.

"Our means secure us, and our mere defects

Prove our commodities."

This passage is not rightly explained in the note in loco. Secure is here used in the Latin sense of securus. So that the meaning is, "Prosperity causes us to feel secure;" that is, makes us negligent or careless.

Page 533.

"You have seen

Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears
Were like: a better way; those happy smilets,
That play'd on her ripe lip, seem'd not to know
What guests were in her eyes."

A wrong punctuation of this passage hitherto has occasioned a good deal of needless tampering with it. Even Mr. White, whose ear is one e truest, and whose judgment one of the clearest, adopts Malone's reading, "Were like a better May;" which, besides rendering the passage more obscure, is a slight lapse towards the prosaic. "You have seen sunshine and rain at once. her smiles and tears were like." Here the expression of the thought is completed at like: her smiles and tears were like, not "a better day," as Theobald would have it, nor "a wetter May," as Warburton would have it; nor "a better May," as Malone and White would have it; but simply "like sunshine and rain at once." And the speaker then goes on to change the figure, expressing his idea in another and, as he thinks, a better way.

Page 534.

"There she shook

The holy water from her heavenly eyes,

And, clamour-moisten'd, then away she started

To deal with grief alone."

Here, again, we are indebted to Mr. White for a welcome item of

relief by a skilful use of punctuation. The passage is commonly printed with a (;) after moisten'd; which makes that word a predicate, and clamour the subject of it. By putting a (,) after And, and a (,) after moisten'd, "clamour-moisten'd" subsides into a mere qualifying epithet; not very elegant or happy indeed, but still much better than as commonly given.

Copy of the Title-Page to the Folio of 1623.

MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies: Published according to the True Original Copies. London: Printed by Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount. 1623.

In the centre of the same page is a head of Shakespeare, engraved by Droeshout; and on a fly-leaf next to this are the following lines by Ben Jonson.

TO THE READER.

This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the Graver had a strife

With Nature, to outdo the life.

O, could he but have drawn his wit

As well in brass, as he hath hit

His face! the Print would then surpass

All that was ever writ in brass.
But, since he cannot, Reader, look
Not on his Picture, but his Book.

B. I.

E

List of Actors prefixed to the same edition.

THE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE CONTAINING ALL HIS COMEDIES, HISTORIES, AND TRAGEDIES: : Truly set forth, according to their first Original.'

The Names of the Principal Actors in all these Plays.

1 This heading precedes the list of the Actors in the first four folio editions. The names here, as in all the rest of this intro ductory matter, are spelt precisely as in the original.

H