was due to him for service. This sum, however, he was ordered to be paid out of concealments of Crown lands to be discovered by him. The authorities, in fact, being in terrible pecuniary straits at this juncture, could only suggest one plan for the supply of additional funds, viz., that of countenancing discoveries to be made by private individuals, either of fresh means of raising moneys, on promise of reward, which were not unfrequent, though apparently futile, or of mines, or concealed Crown, bishops', deans and chapters', or delinquents', property; the allowance to the discoverer being one-fourth or one-fifth of what was realised on his discovery, or more if the State was already indebted to him; and Parliament appointed a special committee on the business of discoveries. The Protector himself was so impressed by this condition of general bankruptcy, that one of his first remedial measures was the nomination of a new committee to inspect the treasuries. He further appointed five members of his Council as a committee to consider the fittest and quickest way for raising and bringing in money, and the most exact method of managing the public treasury, exhorting them (as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in more recent times, has been exhorted) "to be very careful of this important matter."

N°

O parallel to the advance which has been made during recent years in histrionic art is afforded in modern experience. Ten years ago the stage in England was in such evil odour that no form of entertainment was able to lure into a theatre the intellectual portion of the public. With a rapidity that seems scarcely explicable, a complete change of front has been brought about, and theatrical representations are now a favourite form of entertainment with the most cultivated sections of society. Here and there an individual of the hyper-æsthetic school can be found who affects to deride all modern effort that does not run down the grooves with which he is familiar. The reading of the barometer of public feeling is, however, conclusive, and the drama is once more installed in the position it held in the reign of Elizabeth or of Anne. It is just that this should be so, since there has never been a time in the history of art when any European capital, or any centre of intelligence, has exhibited so much admirable acting as may now be seen in London. It might seem invidious to select from many competent performances by English actors one or two impersonations as worthy of exceptional praise. Dismissing, then, for the present, all consideration of English acting, there is a display of foreign art such as London has not witnessed even during

the two memorable visits of the Comédie Française. While France has sent us Mdlle. Sarah Bernhardt, one of the most spoiled and petted, but also one of the most brilliant, products of what is supposed to be the finest school of acting in existence, America has furnished a rival actress in Madame Modjeska, an artist of altogether exceptional powers and endowments. An entire company, meanwhile, from Rotterdam has appeared in our midst; and, besides disclosing in Mdlle. Beersman, its "leading lady," an artist in no sense inferior to either of those previously named, or indeed to any woman on the stage, has evinced a general excellence that must make the Comédie Française look to its laurels. It is, of course, natural that a centre of commerce and civilisation like London should attract from the four corners of the world whatever is most worthy of cognisance in art, and the fact that it does so is in itself scarcely worth chronicling. What, however, is worthy of note is, in an art which seemed almost lost, so sudden a bound has been made into excellence that, a decade after a period of all but total collapse, the favourable verdict of London is the most coveted of artistic distinctions.

A

T a period when the revival of which I have spoken set in, proof of renewed interest in the drama was furnished by the manner in which an audience "damned" a piece of the late John Oxenford, at that time the dramatic critic of the Times. Such an explosion of popular wrath had not for many years been heard. "How they hissed!" exclaimed subsequently the author, who from a private box contemplated the proceedings; "it was like the revival of a lost art." Hissing appears to have been at one period a lost accomplishment, if not a lost art. Horace, in a well-known passage, shows that the practice must have been current in Athens, since he makes the Athenian miser exclaim

Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo

Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arcâ—

lines which Sir Theodore Martin not too happily translates— Like that rich knave who met the jeers

Of the Athenian mob with this:

"The people hoot at me and hiss,
But I at home applaud myself

When in my chest I view my pelf."

Cicero and Terence both state that unsuccessful pieces were hissed. It is told that Æschines the orator, who was also an actor, was hissed off the stage by the spectators; and it is gathered from a statement

in Athenæus that, in addition to such uncomfortable but harmless demonstrations, stones were sometimes employed as a means of chasing an incompetent performer from the theatre. Shakespeare, in Julius Cæsar, makes Casca, speaking of Cæsar, declare, "If the tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him according as he pleased and displeased them, as they used to do the players in the theatre, I am no true man." Be this as it may, the practice seems at least to have fallen into disuse. A manuscript of I. N. du Tralage, a friend of Molière, which, after long search, was found in recent years, and has been this summer published by Bibliophile Jacob, speaks of "Aspar," a piece by M. de Fontenelle, the nephew of M. de Corneille, as being the first piece ever hissed in France. "C'est-là," says he, "l'origine des sifflets. Avant ce temps, on bâilloit et on s'ennuyoit quelquefois aux pièces de Pradon et d'autres poètes à la glace." The Pradon of whom he speaks is, of course, the poet whom the Hôtel de Bouillon set up as a rival of Racine.

A

N admirable piece of satire by Mr. Hollingshead in his recently published volume, "Plain English," affords an indirect and amusing evidence as to the truth of the views concerning the revival of a taste for things dramatic which I have put forth. Describing, at the commencement of his "Tale of Two Chimneys," the amenities in practice at Edendale, the seat of his action, a town which stands in two central and manufacturing counties of Kickingshire and Gougingshire, Mr. Hollingshead declares: "Its population was rough and its amusements were coarse and revolting. The latter consisted of dogfighting, cock-fighting, and occasional bull-baiting six days a week, and prize-fighting on the top of the moors on Sunday. Fighting in those parts meant kicking, biting, and gouging, as well as pummelling, and few working men in Edendale were without physical traces of these encounters. The bishop of the diocese, the clergy of the district, and the parochial magnates of the town, all knew of these brutalities, but, instead of stopping them, they formed a society for the Reform of the Stage and the Elevation of the Drama in London."

A

FEW of Mr. Hollingshead's "explanations" deserve a place in a new Philosophical Dictionary. Among such are "Dry wine-physic in a convivial bottle"; "History-one side of a question"; "Education-a little rowing and less Greek"; "Dyspepsiathe punishment of prosperity;" "Workhouse-a terminus for thirdclass passengers." The whole series of definitions is full of humour.

Nothing so bitter and so good in its way has been seen since the time of Cobbett.

MY

Y friend the director of the New Shakspere Society sends me the following. Sympathising as I do in his objects, I have much pleasure in printing his letter in the Gentleman's Magazine:

IN the Prospectus of the NEW SHAKSPERE SOCIETY issued in the autumn of 1873, I said,

"It is surely time that the patent absurdity should cease, of printing 16th and 17th-century plays, for English scholars, in 19th-century spelling. Assuredly the Folio spelling must be nearer SHAKSPERE'S than that; and nothing perpetuates the absurdity (I imagine) but publishers' thinking the old spelling would make the book sell less."

Accordingly, all the editions of Shakspere's single plays issued by the NEW SHAKSPERE SOCIETY-Romeo and Juliet, by Mr P. A. Daniel; Henry V., by Mr. W. G. Stone; The Two Noble Kinsmen (? partly Shakspere's), by Mr. Harold Littledale-have kept the spelling of the Quarto or Folio on which they were respectively based. But the handsome Quartos of the Society, with their full Introductions and Notes, cost so much, that most likely all our present Members will be dead before our Society's edition of Shakspere's Plays in old spelling can be completed. Now I, for one, want such an edition, and have long wanted it, every day of my life-a handy, working, clear-type edition, with Acts, Scenes, Lines duly numbered, with Text corrected-though only where such correction is absolutely necessary- -so that I may be able (as far as possible) to read and quote Shakspere's words in the spelling in which his contemporaries of Elizabeth's and James I.'s days read them. To see Shakspere's words in Victorian dress is just as offensive to me as it would be to see his bust or picture in Victorian dress. The latter offence, being one against the history of Costume and Art, would meet with such shouts of contempt that it has never yet been tried, and never will be; but the former offence, being one only against the history of the English Language-which the general reader does not care one brass farthing about-is received with the utmost complacency and approval; and self-satisfied ignorance even pours scorn on the proposal to familiarise Shakspere-students with the look and spelling of their master's words as they appeared to his contemporaries, and as they are necessary for the due appreciation of his text. For instance, if the Hamlet put into student's hands had always been founded on that Second Quarto which first gave the real play to the world, and by the side of its "dram of eale" (sign. D, back, p. 19), men had always read the line in which devil is twice spelt "deale "—

"The spirit that I haue feene

May be a deale, and the deale hath power

T' affume a pleafing shape,"

sign. G (page 42), II. ii. 627-9

who can doubt that the parallel deale, devil, eale, evil, would have gone far to settle the meaning of eale, and have spared us nearly all the emendations of that word? Again, if the text of the Tempest had always printed its

"Gon. But the rariety of it is, which is indeed almoft beyond credit.

Seb. As many voucht rarieties are."

as the First Folio, p. 6, col. 2, stands, we should surely have been saved the recent

assertion that rariety was "Another word indiscoverable in any genuine play o Shakespeare."

MR. HORACE HOWARD FURNESS, the editor of the noble new Variorum edition of Shakspere, has said in his last volume-Lear, Preface, p. vi.—

"Happily, the day is fast declining when it is thought necessary to modernise Shakespeare's text. Why should it be modernised? We do not so treat SPENSER. IS SHAKESPEARE'S text less sacred ?"

Surely as the stage has banished Garrick's long wig and George II. coat and ruffles, in Hamlet, from its boards, we Shakspere-students should turn our absurd Victorian spelling out of Shakspere's text.

I do not say that, for the benefit of people who cannot spell, or whose brains get muddled by old spelling, or to whom it is a hindrance, there should not be a modernised Shakspere always on sale; but I do say that for folk who can spell, and who know that the English language has a history, with every phase of which they wish to be familiar, a handy working edition of Shakspere in the spelling of his time should be provided. And I am resolved to provide it, for the first time since Shakspere's death.

After many unsuccessful tries to find a Publisher, I have at length found one in Mr. GEORGE BELL, who, as an old member of the Philological Society, naturally takes no mere trade view of the proposed edition. But I promised him moneyhelp in it, either from the New Shakspere Society or myself.

He has offered to sell the Society 500 large-paper copies of an old-spelling Shakspere's Works (edited by me, with such help from fellow-workers in the Society as I can get), in the style of his Singer's edition in 8 vols, bound in cloth, for 35s. a copy, to be issued at not more than 2 volumes a year, so as to suit the Society's funds.

FEW

FREDK. J. FURNIVALL.

EW subjects inspire more interest than dreams, and the kind of relation between the thoughts which are the direct outcome of observation and reflection, and those

That nature

Gives way to in repose.

In various journals and other periodicals I have read particulars of dreams showing the kind of divorce from his own individuality, so to speak, of which a sleeper is capable. One case of the kind mentioned some time ago in the Pall Mall Gazette bore a strong resemblance to a dream of my own, but was, I think, in several ways less remarkable. No apology is necessary for introducing in the case of so impersonal a being as Sylvanus Urban an actual experience, if it may be so called, where it is likely to be of service towards framing psychological theories, however profitless these may remain. In my dream, then, one day I paused at the top of Grosvenor Place, to look at a funeral procession that was turning eastward from that street up Piccadilly. A slight sense of interest was aroused by observing that those within the carriages were my nearest of kin, but this disappeared as I