recent Conference; themselves following logically from the still unfulfilled Resolutions of the Paris Conference, which at the time were represented as urgent. Mr. Lloyd George has even exhumed "burdens on food," showing that the era of "ninepence for fourpence" is not extinct after all; the Daily News rejoices to think that the United States, having joined us to make the world safe for national liberty, now bars our way to doing what we wish in our own household; Mr. Bonar Law, characteristically, would postpone it all until after the war, thereby giving the reactionaries and their foreign friends time to get together again. Meanwhile the Britannic Commonwealth has already shown that, all the prophets notwithstanding, an alliance of nation-States can meet the exigencies of a great war, even to the point—which the wider alliance of the Entente Powers has failed to reach-of submitting all its combatant forces to unified control. It has still to meet a greater strain in the arrangement of the terms of peace, unless the military victory of the Entente can be made decisive. But if it survives that supreme ordeal can it prove unequal to its happier responsibilities?

RICHARD JEBB

EDWARDS'S "CANONS OF CRITICISM

POPE, in a letter to Caryll, speaks of having pictures of Dryden, Milton, Shakespeare, etc., hung about his room," that the constant remembrance of them may keep him always humble.” To what extent this mental antiseptic affected him when in 1721-25 he was editing the last-named poet is unrecorded; but it certainly did not in any way influence the successor and collaborator who "revised" his work in 1747. For humility was by no means one of the prominent characteristics of the Reverend and Learned William Warburton. Of all critics, he was certainly the most "robustious "; of all commentators, the most dogmatic and domineering, while his controversial language can often only be described as insufferably offensive. His heterogeneous erudition was admittedly enormous; but however well equipped as a fighting polemic and theologian, his literary judgment was not on a level with his pretensions. His conjectural emendations of Shakespeare are now almost universally discredited; but even in his own day, when the study of Shakespeare's text was still in leading-strings, there were not wanting readers independent enough to question the decrees of the self-constituted legislator whom his parasites extolled as an intellectual Colossus. One of the most vivacious of the objectors was Thomas Edwards, a barrister, of whose ironical Canons of Criticism it is now proposed to give some account. But in this exceptional instance there is so much more to be said of the work and its origin than of the writer himself, that it will be convenient to reverse the customary order of procedure and begin with the book. And this course is the more excusable because the scanty facts of Edwards's career chiefly concern his closing years.

In 1747, when as already stated-Warburton issued his eight-volume edition of The Works of Shakespear, he had but four predecessors in the editorial field-Rowe, Pope, Theobald, and Hanmer. First, in 1709, had come Nicholas Rowe, the playwright and Poet Laureate, with the earliest attempt at a biography. This the standard eighteenth-century life-opportunely garnered much floating tradition; but Rowe did little or nothing for the rectification of the text. To him, in 1725, suc

ceeded Pope, more literary, but less practically equipped in stagecraft and in what he contemptuously called "the dull duty of an Editor.' As might be expected, his "Preface," full as it is of good things, is the most memorable part of his performance. His notes, however, were sharply criticized by a lesser man, Lewis Theobald, the typical "Codrus" of English verse, "distressed" enough to be traditionally perpetuated in Hogarth's "sky-parlour," yet, withal, so considerable a scholar and critic as to earn for himself a vindictive pre-eminence in the Dunciad as the predecessor of Colley Cibber. It was Theobald whose "lucky guessing "that "lucky guessing" which Jane Austen held has always some talent in it *-by its substitution of " a' babbled of green fields" for the old version, " a table of green fields," shed parting radiance on the lifelike death-bed of Falstaff; and this was by no means Theobald's only fortunate hit. Moreover, it is to Theobald's credit that he endeavoured to interpret his author's text not so much by an eighteenth-century standard as by the current speech-" the obsolete and uncommon phrases"—of that author's contemporaries. Theobald was the third of Warburton's predecessors. The fourth (1743-44) was Sir Thomas Hanmer of Mildenhall, near Newmarket, in Suffolk, a cultivated country gentleman, who had long been a dignified and respected Speaker of the House of Commons. As an editor he seems to have held Goldsmith's rule that the best commentator is common sense, and, for the rest, to have relied on the typography of the Clarendon Press and the artful aid of Frank Hayman's weedy designs, as translated by the "sculptures" of Gravelot. Then, at length, thoughtfully trumpeted beforehand in volume ix of Birch's General Dictionary and The History of the Works of the Learned, came the announcement of a more complete and accurate edition" from the Rev. William Warburton. At the date of publication, May 1747,† Warburton had not been long married to Miss Gertrude Tucker, the niece of Ralph Allen of Prior Park, and had recently been appointed to the preachership of Lincoln's Inn Chapel, an office which had been procured for him by "silver-tongued Murray, afterwards Lord Mansfield. But he was already famous as the author of the never-completed Divine Legation of Moses, and he had established himself in the affections of Pope by his adroit vindication of the dubious orthodoxy of the Essay on Man-a work which, by the way, he had formerly assailed.

* Emma, chap. i.

As

†The Works of Shakespear, by Mr. Pope and Mr. Warburton, in 8 vols. 8vo, pr. 21 88 (Gentleman's Magazine for May 1747, vol. xvii, p. 252). The title further professed to give the "Genuine Text " as restored from the Blunders of the first Editors, and the Interpolations of the two Last."

Prior's Life of Malone, 1860, pp. 430–1.

a natural consequence of this new alliance, Pope's labours on Shakespeare had assumed an exaggerated value in his eyes, and on his title-page he figured as Pope's coadjutor. But when, in 1747, the book at last appeared, Pope was dead.

So also, for the matter of that, were Hanmer and Theobald, though, to do Warburton justice, there is no reason for supposing that their presence or absence on this planet would have prevented him from abusing them to the full of his bent. This he proceeded to do in his "Preface." Both of them, if we are to believe him, had made unwarrantable use of his material:

The One [Theobald] was recommended to me as a poor Man; the Other [Hanmer] as a poor Critic: and to each of them, at different times, I communicated a great number of Observations, which they managed, as they saw fit, to the Relief of their several Distresses. As to Mr. Theobald, who wanted Money, I allowed him to print what I gave him for his own Advantage: and he allowed himself in the Liberty of taking one Part for his own, and sequestering another for the Benefit, as I supposed, of some future Edition. But, as to the Oxford Editor [Hanmer], who wanted nothing but what he might very well be without, the Reputation of a Critic, I could not so easily forgive him for trafficking with my Papers without my Knowledge; and, when that Project fail'd, for employing a number of my Conjectures in his Edition against my expressed Desire not to have that Honour done unto me.

There is more to the same effect; but seeing that Warburton's own biographer candidly confesses that "these passages contain much, we fear, that is disingenuous, not to say false," it is only waste of time to dissect or discuss them; and although it is clear that Warburton had personal relations with both Theobald and Hanmer, it is hopeless, at this date, to decide exactly how much he lent to, or borrowed from, either of them.† But-at the risk of anticipating-it is instructive to contrast here with Warburton's malevolent and skilfully generalized indictment of his forerunners, honest old Johnson's treatment of Warburton himself when, eighteen years later, Warburton, in his turn, came up for judgment as a Shakespeare commentator. It is true that Warburton was alive when Johnson wrote, and that, with Voltaire, Johnson rightly recognized the obligation of " tenderness to living reputation.' He also respected Warburton's extraordinary learning. "The table is always full, Sir," he said of the miscellaneous bill of fare provided in the Divine Legation. "He brings things from the north and the south and from every quarter." And he also cherished a praiseworthy gratitude to Warburton for a commendatory word respecting some of his own tentative and unfriended efforts in Shakespeare criticism. But, although, for these reasons, his deliverance is perhaps a trifle laboured, espe

* Watson's Life of Warburton, 1863, pp. 300–1.

"Such improvements as he [Warburton] introduced are mainly borrowed from Theobald and Hanmer" (Life of Shakespeare, by Sir Sidney Lee, 1898, p. 318). ‡ Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, 1745.

cially when compared with the weighty passages on editorial futility by which it is succeeded, these considerations did not prevent him from writing what must always be regarded as the last word on Warburton's Shakespear:

The original and predominant errour of his [Warburton's] commentary, is acquiescence in his first thoughts; that precipitation which is produced by consciousness of quick discernment; and that confidence which presumes to do, by surveying the surface, what labour only can perform, by penetrating the bottom. His notes exhibit sometimes perverse interpretations, and sometimes improbable conjectures; he at one time gives the author more profundity of meaning than the sentence admits, and at another discovers absurdities where the sense is plain to every other reader. But his emendations are likewise often happy and just; and his interpretation of obscure passages learned and sagacious.

Of his notes I have commonly rejected those against which the general voice of the publick has exclaimed, or which their own incongruity immediately condemns and which, I suppose, the author himself would desire to be forgotten. Of the rest, to part I have given the highest approbation, by inserting the offered reading in the text; part I have left to the judgment of the reader, as doubtful, though specious, and part I have censured without reserve, but I am sure without bitterness of malice, and, I hope, without wantonness of insult.*

This impartial, restrained, and even indulgent judgment would probably at no time have satisfied the inordinate vanity of Warburton, least of all when, in 1765, he first read it in type, having in the interim shouldered his way through various preferments to the Bishopric of Gloucester, and, presumably, long since spent the five hundred pounds (more than Johnson or Pope received) which he had extracted from Tonson for the copyright. With commendable prudence, he said nothing in public; but he grumbled in writing to his henchman Hurd and another correspondent about the "folly " and " malignity " of "this Johnson who had ventured to question his authority as a Shakespeare commentator. Of course, by this time, Johnson's praise or dispraise could matter little to Warburton, whose "chimerical conceits" (the phrase is Malone's) had already been sufficiently exposed by several lesser men. One of these was Dr. Zachary Grey, the superabundant notes to whose edition of Butler's Hudibras Warburton had characterized as an execrable heap of nonsense," though he himself had contributed to them. Another was John Upton, later the editor of Spenser, who, with special reference to Warburton, put forth a series of Observations on Shakespeare. But the most memorable of the group was Thomas Edwards, to whom we owe The Canons of Criticism.

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Although there is a legend that Edwards had once met Warburton in Allen's library at Prior Park, and had successfully confuted him (before his wife) about a passage from a Greek author, in which Warburton had manifestly relied on a French translation, there is no ground for supposing that Edwards was

* Johnson's Works, 1810, ii, pp. 177–8.