actuated by any hostile feeling. In fact, long after the Canons had appeared, he wrote that he did not know Warburton personally, which, even if there were not other discrepancies, would be fatal to the story. Edwards was not a professed critic, indeed, as far as we are aware; though "liberally educated,” he had never been either at a public school or a university. But he was a natural scholar, devoted in particular to Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare, whom he had studied in order to comprehend their meaning rather than to write about them. Warburton's fantastic and needless variations honestly roused in him that righteous indignation-the "noble anger "of King Lear-which Bishop Butler has declared to be "not only innocent, but a generous movement of mind." And Warburton, in his full-blown arrogance, had afforded him an excellent opportunity for retortnay, had even indicated the very form it should take. He had once intended-his "Preface" loftily announced-to have given his readers "a body of Canons, for literal Criticism," drawn out in form; as well such as concern the art in general as those that arise from the nature and circumstances of the author's works in particular; but these uses-he complacently added-might be well supplied by what he had bccasionally said on the subject in the course of his remarks. He had also designed to give "a general alphabetic Glossary" of peculiar terms; but as those were explained in their proper places, there seemed the less occasion for such an "Index. There could be no more inviting provocation to the profane than this pronouncement, and Edwards immediately availed himself of it. He forthwith set to work to frame a burlesque code of Canons, deduced directly from Warburton's notes, with illustrations drawn from that writer's emendations. To these he subjoined a Glossary based-of course from his own point of view-on Warburton's indications. His essay, first issued in April 1748, by Cooper of Paternoster Row, as a shilling pamphlet,* was advertised as a Supplement to Mr. Warburton's Edition of Shakespear, "collected from the Notes in that celebrated Work, and proper to be bound up with it "-the authorship being ascribed to a " Gentleman of Lincoln's Inn." Later issues changed the title to The Canons of Criticism and Glossary, etc. In the sixth and enlarged edition, dated 1758, is to be found the following extremely appropriate (if slightly adapted) motto from Addison's fortieth Freeholder: "There is not a more melancholy Object in the Learned World, than a Man who has written himself down. . . . In this Case . . . one could wish that his Friends and Relations would keep him from

* Gentleman's Magazine for April 1748 (vol. xviii, p. 192). The date satisfactorily disposes of the allegation that Edwards had hindered the sale of Warburton's book, since that book had appeared a twelvemonth earlier (Canons of Criticism, 1758, p. 14).

the Use of Pen, Ink and Paper if he is not to be reclaimed by any other Methods. "*

To reprint the twenty-five Canons which Edwards prefixed to his pamphlet would be superfluous, as they are all much on the same lines; but a few may be reproduced as specimens. No. I

runs:

A Professed Critic has a right to declare that his Author wrote whatever He thinks he ought to have written; with as much positiveness, as if He had been at his Elbow. No. II. He has a right to alter any passage which He does not understand.

No. IV. Where he does not like an expression, and yet cannot mend it; He may abuse his Author for it.

No. V. Or He may condemn it, as a foolish interpolation.

No. VII. He may find out obsolete words, or coin new ones; and put them in the place of such, as He does not like, or does not understand.

No. IX. He may interpret his Author so; as to make him mean directly contrary to what He says.

These are some only of the Canons, but a small harvest will suffice. To borrow the memorable words of Captain Cuttle's oracular friend: "The bearing of these observations lays in the application on them" rather than in any gnomic neatness they possess; and this application Edwards goes on to supply with considerable gusto. In this respect one may draw on him more liberally. Some of the examples he adduces are certainly marvels of editorial ineptitude. Thus when Othello (Act III, sc. iii) speaks of "the ear-piercing fife" (now almost as ancient a friend as the journalistic "welkin "), Warburton would substitute "th' fear-'spersing fife," on the inexplicable ground that " piercing the ear is not an effect on the hearers." His own ear must have been lamentably at fault since, in another place, he proposes to read, for the "Whoso draws a sword, 'tis present death" of 1 Henry VI, Act III, sc. iv, the unspeakable "Whoso draws a sword i' th' presence 't's death "-a line which, if we fail to follow Edwards in thinking that it seems "penned for Cadmus when in the state of a serpent," certainly proves that the "Professed Critic," with the modern parodist, liked :

I

to dock the smaller parts o' speech, As we curtail the already cur-tailed cur.t

Another entirely superfluous alteration is where the Fool in King Lear says (Act III, sc. ii): "I'll speak a prophecy, or e'er go. This Warburton, on the ridiculous pretence that or e'er I go is not English," amends into: "I'll speak a proph'cy, or two, e'er I go." It is not necessary, at present, to give, as Edwards does, and mostly from the Bible, a page of illustrations defending the use of the locution or e'er." It may, however, be urged,

* Here Addison seems to be echoing a well-known saying of Bentley.

† Calverley's Fly Leaves, 2nd ed., 1872, p. 113.

perhaps not unreasonably, that Warburton's emendations are more than a hundred and fifty years old; and that he wrote before Bartlett's and Mrs. Cowden-Clarke's indispensable Concordances, to say nothing of the glossaries of Dyce and his successors.* And there is something, too, in Warburton's complaint to a sympathetic friend that "to discover the corruption in an author's text, and by a happy sagacity to restore it to sense, is no easy task: and when the discovery is made, then to cavil at the conjecture, to propose an equivalent, and defend nonsense, by producing out of the thick darkness it occasions, a weak and faint glimmering of sense... is the easiest, as well as dullest, of all literary efforts." † That is so, unquestionably, when, in both cases, the result is naught. But who would seek to better "a' babbled of green fields"? Here, in truth, the critic is " on a level with the author." But where is the "happy sagacity "-the curiosa felicitas of Warburton's "enlard" for "enlarge" in the "and doth enlarge ‡ his rising" (2 Henry IV, Act I, sc. i), a perfectly legitimate alternative for "increase his army." Or where again is the necessity for converting " denier into "tanière" in "My dukedom to a beggarly denier" (Richard III, Act I, sc. ii)—odds, it may be noted in passing, as intelligibly extreme as the eighteenthcentury "All Lombard Street to a China orange. "Denier " is the twelfth part of a sou; but “tanière," even if, as Warburton says, it may be taken to mean a hut or cave (which is by no means its ordinary signification), is surely a suggestion so farfetched as scarcely to be worth the carriage back. But perhaps the most astounding of Warburton's amendments is his correction of the much-discussed couplet in Amiens' song (As You Like It, Act II, sc. vii) :

Thy tooth is not so keen
Because thou art not seen.

6

Warburton holds that "Without doubt Shakespeare wrote Because thou art not sheen "" (obsolete for "striking, shining.") This is more than "midsummer madness," it is sheer academic amentia,§ and instead of making matters clear, serves solely to obscure what is obvious.

These illustrations might easily be extended by going farther afield. But, at this time of the day, it is not necessary to prove Warburton's self-sufficient incompetence up to the hilt. One of

* E.g. the excellent Shakespeare Glossary of Mr. C. T. Onions, 1911.

† Letters from a late Eminent Prelate, 2nd ed., 1809, p. 368.

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Shakespeare himself uses enlard" in its sense of "fatten" in Troilus and Cressida, Act II, sc. iii.

But

§ The most intelligible variation is Staunton's "Because thou art foreseen." surely no revision is required. One need not swear to the truth of a song ”—even

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by Shakespeare.

the blunders which aroused the mirth of Edwards, and the discovery of which disturbed his victim much as a bandillera might be supposed to irritate a bull, was, it is possible, no more than an error of the press, though a most inconvenient one. In referring to Cinthio's Hecatommithi, a Shakespearean source, Pope had used the contraction, " Dec. 8, Nov. 5," which Warburton's overofficious printer had amplified into "December 8, November 5," whereas, if expanded at all, it should have been "Decade 8, Novel 5"; and matters were not improved when, to Warburton's angry reply, Edwards gleefully rejoined that an error of the same kind had been made in speaking of a quotation from the Faerie Queene. There is, however, no lack of real aberration in Warburton's notes, and if our object were to do more than justify the protest of Edwards, it would, as we have said, be easy to enlard" the schedule. What, for instance, could be the possible good of discussing the following senseless comment on the prayers from preserved souls" of Measure for Measure (Act II, sc. ii)"The metaphor is taken from fruits, preserved in sugar"? Or, from examples under Canon II: "He [the Critic] has a right to alter any passage which He does not understand," take the following, "The fixure of her eye has motion in 't 't" (Winter's Tale, Act V, sc. iii, where Hermione is personating a statue). Says Warburton: "This is sad nonsense. We should read The fissure of her eye,' i.e. the Socket "-a suggestion which might have come from the Damasippus of Horace. It is sufficient to say that fissure means a "split" and not a socket," while "fixure " is good Shakespearean for "fixedness." This trick of replacing Shakespeare's word by another that resembles it is part of Warburton's modus operandi, though he may have caught the device from the "babbled " for table" of Theobald. Thus, he puts, not only sheen for seen, but "wing" for sing, ware for "war, gear " for "deer," "blending for "bending,' ," "hallows" for "allows," "tallies " for "dallies," "vowels" for "bowels," and so forth-variations which, in every case, serve simply to support Johnson's preference for the older readings, and enforce his position that conjecture, if it be sometimes unavoidable, should not be "wantonly nor licentiously indulged." Warburton's notes are, in truth, a lucky-bag of lapses into which one may plunge anywhere with the certitude of finding something to rival that real, or imagined, pedagogue (from Boeotia) who proposed, in lieu of the authorized version, to read Sermons in books, stones in the running brooks"; or that other egregious wiseacre, fabled by Mr. Punch, who made the

* Of course, Warburton-as Johnson says-sometimes scores. But his failures are far more frequent than his successes; and it is with his failures that Edwards is concerned.

imperishable discovery that Yorick was Hamlet's father because, in handling Yorick's skull, Hamlet said "Pah."

To give an idea of Warburton's anger and astonishment at the attack of Edwards would require a string of those preparatory similes which Fielding employs so effectively to introduce a thunderbolt. Warburton had no doubt counted on unqualified approbation; or, at the worst (if there could be a worst!), on the conventional homage usually accorded to distinguished personages who take up unfamiliar tasks under pretence of pastime. But that the author of the Divine Legation should be "scotched and notched like a carbonado "* by a nameless nobody-a mere Inns of Court amateur-was a thing to make angels weep. His indignation was irrepressible; and he exhibited his resentment in the most unworshipful manner. Public reply was, of course, out of the question-probably he felt that Edwards was far too "cunning of fence.' But he poured contempt on him- privately in all companies; and, as opportunity offered, inserted spiteful and irrelevant passages about him in the notes to Pope on which he was engaged. In the Essay on Criticism, referring to Edwards by name, he spoke of him disdainfully as a critic having neither parts nor learning, a "Fungoso"† of Lincoln's Inn; and in the fourth book of the Dunciad, taking advantage of Pope's line about the children of Dulness:

Who study Shakespeare at the Inns of Court

(a line which had assuredly no connexion whatever with Edwards), he delivered himself of a scurrilous, and, at this date, rather unintelligible tirade against his adversary, on whose birth and social status he cast invidious reflections, and further stigmatized

him as a mushroom," a "Caliban for politeness, a "Grub

Street writer run to seed "-and so forth, all of which, in an ecclesiastic of eminence occupying the pulpit of Usher and Tillotson, was most discreditable and deplorable.

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Edwards, who had been quietly amplifying his evidence in enlarged editions of the Canons, was moved by these things to abandon his anonymity; and he did so in a preface" to the later issues. He was manifestly wounded by the attempt to degrade him of his gentility," though he did not condescend (as he might have done) to retort specifically to Warburton in this respect. But he naturally, and successfully, vindicated his right, equally with Warburton, to study Shakespeare, if he pleased; and to laugh, if he chose, at "unscholarlike blunders,"

* Warburton's definition of "carbonado," after Pope, is perversely characteristic. He says it should be "carbinado," and that "carbinadoed" means marked by wounds made by a carabine!

↑ "Fungoso" is one of the characters in Ben Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour. Pope mentioned him in the Essay on Criticism.