"Some by stenography drew The plot, put it in print (scarce one word true), And in that lameness it hath limped so long, The author now, to vindicate that wrong, Hath took the pains upright upon its feet To teach it walk." Later (1630) he repeats the same statement: "Some of my plays have (unknown to me and without any of my direction) accidentally come into the printer's hands, and therefore so corrupt and mangled (copied only by the ear) that I have been as unable to know them as ashamed to challenge them," etc. Heywood further declares that some authors, after selling their plays to the stage, made a second profit by a sale to the printer. Against these schemes the managers used every device in their power to delay or prevent the printing of the plays they had purchased. They procured the intervention of their powerful patrons; and the lord chamberlain's influence was at times invoked to protect his company, of which Shakespeare was a member, from this appropriation of their property. Sometimes the printers were bribed to put off issuing a play from the press till its novelty on the stage had worn off. By these various means plays were sometimes "stayed" for two, four, or six months, occasionally for years, and some of those entered for publication were never brought out in separate form. On the other hand, it looks as though in some cases the managers, or perhaps the author himself (like Heywood, in the instance. above), goaded to desperation by some mutilated issue of a play, consented to a second edition, printed from a perfect manuscript. Stevens suggests that "it seems to have been the practice of the numerous theatres, in the time of Shakespeare, to cause some bookseller to make immediate entries of their new pieces, as a security against the encroachments of their rivals," but this is hardly probable. There are still many puzzling questions about these matters that perhaps will never be answered with certainty. Sometimes the Register fails to show that a license was issued for the printing of some book that we have. For example, Romeo and Juliet was printed in 1597, and Love's Labour's Lost in 1598, though there is no record on the Register that either of them was ever licensed. This must be an error of omission from the Register, for in 1607 a transfer of the ownership of each of them is recorded. Occasionally, too, the members of the Stationers' Company seem not to have had much respect for one another's rights. Midsummer Night's Dream was licensed to Thomas Fisher in 1600, and published by him; but the same year an unauthorized edition was brought out by James Roberts. This was probably one of those cases alluded to by Justice Willes, where fines were sometimes imposed on refractory members for piracy on the rights of their fellows. By these various means no less than twenty of Shakespeare's plays, including Pericles, were printed separately during his life, and one more, Othello, in 1622, after his death; some of them going through several editions. Four among these appeared under different names from those they bear at present, and in many of the Quartos the text varies materially from our present versions. We have no positive knowledge how these plays were issued, except in the case of Troilus and Cressida, where the remarkable prefatory address of the publisher states distinctly that he printed it in defiance of the owners, the "grand possessors," as he calls them, — and he claims the thanks of the reader for so doing. And after all, the world owes a certain debt of gratitude to these pirates, for we have many Elizabethan plays and poems which would have utterly perished but for them. On the other hand, a good stage-right law would have given us as perfect a text of Shakespeare's plays as we now have of his poems. It is a melancholy thought that, with all the pleasure the reading public has derived from the printing of these dramas, it is not likely that the author himself ever received a penny for their publication. We will now consider the publication of the Folio of 1623 in the light of the copyright question. This precious volume, containing thirty-six plays, was issued seven years after the death of Shakespeare. Of these plays, sixteen were new to the press, and were licensed to Ed[ward] Blount and Isaac Jaggard; the remaining twenty had presumably been printed before, and for that reason required no license. The book was edited by Heminge and Condell, Shakespeare's fellow-actors and personal friends, members of the King's Company, and perhaps at that time shareholders of the Blackfriars and Globe theatres; and it was printed, says the title-page, at London by Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623, while, according to the note on the last page, the work was done "at the charges of W. Jaggard, Ed. Blount, J. Smithweeks, and W. Aspley." It was a great undertaking for the time, and two editors, four publishers, and two printing - houses shared in the work. The sixteen new plays must have been furnished by Heminge and Condell from the collection of manuscript dramas in the library of the King's Company, and were licensed to Blount and Isaac Jaggard in the following terms: "Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, so many of the said copies as are not formerly entered to other men;" then follows a list of the sixteen new ones. The publishers of the volume must also have gathered into their possession the copyrights of all the plays which had been previously printed, thus gaining the right to issue the entire volume. Pericles had been already printed in Quarto form, but was left out of the Folio, possibly because its authorship was doubtful, or perhaps the pub lishers could not obtain the right to reprint it. Such were the conditions of copyright under which Shakespeare's various works were first printed. The only protection enjoyed by authors was through the printing monopoly held by the Stationers' Company. Probably the only profit the poet ever derived from the sale of his printed works was through his contracts for the publication of Venus and Lucrece. The printing of the Quartos during his life may have been actually an injury to him in so far as it destroyed the stage monopoly of the plays held by the King's Company, of which he was a member. It only remains to say that the licensing regulations lapsed in 1694, and a few years later, in 1710, the first English copyright statute was passed by Parliament, giving the author control over the publication of his works for a specified number of years, which limited form of ownership has prevailed in Europe and America till to-day. It will be observed that the question of the author's common law right to his work — that is, the absolute ownership of his literary productions in perpetuity, like any other property has not come up in the foregoing pages. This point seems never to have arisen in Shakespeare's time. Nearly two centuries later it came before the courts, when the copyright of Thomson's Seasons expired, and his representatives tried to prevent its publication by other parties. When the question was brought before the court of King's Bench in Millar vs. Taylor, the court decided by a vote of three to one, Lord Mansfield being one of the majority, that the copyright of a book belongs to the author at common law, and that this right was not taken away by the statute of 1710. The matter came before the House of Lords on an appeal from a decree of the court of Chancery founded upon this judgment, and in the great case of Donaldson vs. Beckett the Lords held, first, by a vote of eight to three, that the author of any literary composition had the sole right of first printing and publishing the same for sale, and might bring an action against any person who printed, published, and sold the same without his consent; second, by seven to four, that the common law did not take away this right upon his printing and publishing such literary composition; third, by six to five, that such action at common law was taken away by the statute of 8th Anne, and the author was precluded by the said statute from every remedy except on the foundation of the statute and on the terms and conditions prescribed thereby; or, in other words, the court held that after the passage of the statute the author's ownership was changed from a perpetuity under the common law to an ownership limited to a term of years under the statute. It had been contended on behalf of the author that his right of property in his composition was a perpetuity; that the statute merely gave him an additional protection for a term of years, and when that expired his common law rights still remained. But the court held the contrary view, that the statute terminated the common law perpetuity. Lord Mansfield, being a peer, did not vote. Had he voted, it would have stood six to six on the third proposition, and the legal estimate of authors' rights under the statute might have been materially changed. The arguments of the justices favoring the rights of authors were based upon two grounds: First, the moral ground, that men should have the same unrestricted right of ownership in their literary works as in any other form of human productions. Second, the historic precedent, asserting that ever since 1558 rights of property in literary compositions had been re cognized. Now, it is true that copyright in literary compositions had been recog nized as property ever since 1558, but it was through the customs and by-laws of the Stationers' Company, and not by the statutes and the courts; and these rights were vested in the Stationers, and not in the authors. The facts cited in the foregoing pages show conclusively that the piratical printers of Elizabeth's time regarded with contempt any supposed right of ownership outside of their own number, and were in the habit of printing manuscripts that fell into their hands without any concern for the common law rights of the author. The truth is that respect for literary ownership is a thing of comparatively modern growth. As the literature of England increased in volume and value, that value demanded recognition and received it, first in the laws of the Stationers' monopoly, then in the copyright statute of 1710, then in partial recognition of the common law right by the courts in 1774. Since the passage of the statute of 8th Anne, this protection has been extended to music, drawings, painting, and statuary; stage-right has been introduced in the case of plays; and last of all, international copyright has been obtained. The rights of authors rest, not upon historic precedent, but upon the growth of public sentimert; it is a matter of evolution rather than of history. It is easily within the range of possi bilities that the growing public sentiment in favor of literary ownership may by and by be strong enough to overturn that interpretation of the law in 1774 adopted by the narrow vote of six to five (which even then would not have prevailed but for the unfortunate courtesy of Lord Mansfield in withholding his vote), and may establish the principle that authors should own their productions in perpetuity, the same as other property. Horace Davis. ory. THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS. THE greatest achievements in poetry have been made by men who lived close to their times, and who responded easily to their environment. Not that Taine was altogether right in his climatic the The individual counts for much, and his output is really the result of the combined action of two influences, his personality and his surroundings,a sort of intellectual parallelogram of forces. Nor is great poetic accomplishment necessarily a sympathetic expression of contemporary tendencies. On the contrary, it may often antagonize them. But whether it antagonize or approve, it is apt to be vitally related to them. No man ever set his face more strenuously against the trend of his age than Dante, nor denounced its manners and morals more severely; yet Dante was directly concerned in the practical affairs of his day, and his epoch is epitomized in his poems. Of course, great poetry bases itself below the shifting surfaces of eras and nationalities upon the immovable bed-rock of our common humanity; and so the greatest poets, the poets who express life most fundamentally, come to have a certain likeness to one another, even though they be as widely separated in time and space as Homer and Shakespeare. But the poet must learn his human lesson at first hand; he must find the essential realities of life where he can see them with his own eyes, under the transitory garments which they wear in his day; and to do this he must be interested in his day. There have been now and again, however, certain poets who seem to have been born out of due time. They have not been opposed to their age so much as apart from it. The Hamlets of verse, for them the time has been out of joint, and they have not had the intensity or the resolution to strive to set it right. Thrown back upon themselves by an environment which was distasteful to them, but which they lacked either the force or the inclination to wrestle with and overcome, they have necessarily had little to say. But on that very account they have frequently given more thought to the purely artistic side of their work than more copious writers. Such men were Collins and Gray, and afterwards Landor, men whom we admire more for the classic beauty of their style and for other technical qualities than for the scope of their imagination or the penetration of their insight. Of this class of poets, and with no mean rank among them, was Thomas William Parsons. Beginning to write contemporaneously with the earliest American poets, at a time when only the veriest doggerel had yet been perpetrated in this country, he felt keenly the sense of isolation which it was the lot of men of letters in those days to experience, - an isolation the reality of which the younger generation finds it difficult to appreciate. This is the excuse, though it is certainly not a justification, for the deprecatory and provincial tone which characterizes what are probably the earliest of his poems that have been preserved, the Letters which stand at the beginning of his first vol easy security with regard to her which should mark the citizen of a nationality fully mature. Yet even in these presumably juvenile verses there is much vigorous writing and some genuine humor. This on Boston, for example: "This town, in olden times of stake and flame, Save when old Sternhold and his brother bard Oped their hoarse throats, and strained an authem hard. From that angelic race of perfect men (Sire, seraphs never trod the world till then!) Descends the race to whom the sway is given Of the world's morals by confiding Heaven." There was always a strain of true religious feeling in Parsons, which deep ened at the last into something rapt and intense; but Puritanism never ceased to be hateful to him, and this antagonism contributed to make him feel that his botsteps were on alien soil. An artist first of all, he was drawn more toward the services of the ancient Church, for whose adornment art has so bountifully poured out its treasures, than to any balder form of worship. To him the world was a problem in beauty and emotion. He was not incommoded with a message, as so many of his contemporaries were. This has been, perhaps, to the detriment of his reputation in the past; it may be to its advantage in the future. The man who speaks too consciously a message to his own time is apt to have none for any other. Parsons wrought from first to last in the true artistic spirit, and it is not unlikely that his chief claims to the recognition of the future will be found in qualities of form and style. Not the least among these qualities will be that sturdy literary independence which, amid the widespread æsthetic re vival of this century, achieved a success of a purely æsthetic nature on lines entirely unaffected by the contemporary fashion. In a time of metrical experiment and of the new and strange harmonies of Rossetti and Swinburne, he alone of the artistic school of poets, uninfluenced even by Coleridge or Shelley, worked in the severe methods of an earlier day. Dryden and Pope seem to have been his earliest masters, but not for long. The versification of Dryden, which Keats learned to appreciate at its true value, remained always to some extent a factor in Parsons's art, but he soon threw over the jingle of Pope's measure for the fuller, statelier, and in truth simpler manner of Collins and Gray. Yet his matured style is neither that of Collins, with whom he had close resemblances, personal and poetical, nor that of Gray, though unquestionably akin to both. Parsons had, besides, a certain bent for plain words and homely images that sometimes became Dantesque. Indeed, the lifelong study which he gave to Dante could not be without its influence on his own expression, - an influence potent for strength and directness. Parsons was probably Gray's inferior in point of taste, for otherwise we can hardly understand how he could put forth in the same volume, and sometimes in the same poem, such inequalities as he permitted himself. Yet it must be said, as an offset to this, that he seldom made himself responsible for a poem by publishing it. He occasionally had verses in the magazines, and even, if the whim took him, in the newspapers; but only twice in his life did he bring the question of his critical judg ment fairly within the scope of comment by issuing a volume to the public. The first of these volumes, which contains the famous Lines on a Bust of Dante, may perhaps rely upon the youth of its author as an explanation of its unevenness. The other, Circum Præcordia, published in the year of his death, and con |