my only copy of the five printed volumes, interlined and interleaved in most places, which I had employed several years in improving and enlarging, together with my manuscript of the sixth unpublished. He wrote to me on his arrival in England, telling me that they were already on their voyage to their destination.'

They had sailed from Leghorn, and the sequel of their adventures will shortly be stated. A few lines of a letter from Lady Blessington to Landor will tell us meanwhile of the other packet also taken charge of by the traveller. 'I have received' (9th June 1834) 'your manuscript, and am delighted with it. 'Mr. Willis delivered it to me with your letter, and I endea'voured to show him all the civility in my power, in honour of his recommendation.' The manuscript was the book about Shakespeare, of which we have seen mention in the family letters from time to time, as 'curious' and even wicked;' which was published in London in the autumn of 1834; and of which some account is now due.

VI. EXAMINATION OF SHAKESPEARE FOR DEER-STEAling.

The letter in the foregoing section, dated at the close of January 1835, is the last which Landor wrote to his sisters from Italy; and I have retained in it an allusion quite undeserved to a youthful criticism of mine upon the Shakespeare book, because it led to my acquaintance with the writer not many weeks after his arrival in England. The opinion then formed of that book I retain unaltered. One of the last things said to me by Charles Lamb, a week or two before his death, was that only two men could have written the Examination of Shakespeare-he who wrote it, and the man it was written on; and that is exactly what I think.

Landor's first notice of it to Lady Blessington had been in a letter of the previous April, in which, after mentioning that he had for some time been composing The Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare, Euseby Treen, Joseph Carnaby, and Silas Gough, Clerk, before the Worshipful Sir Thomas Lucy, Knight, touching Deer-Stealing on the 19th Day of September, in the Year of Grace 1582, now first published from Original Papers, he added, 'This is full of fun; I know not whether of

'wit. It is the only thing I ever wrote that is likely to sell.' This was a hint to his friend that she was to get him some money for it, which indeed he had already promised, with unquenched ardour of hope and all his old splendour of beneficence, to a school-fellow in distress. But by the time Lady Blessington wrote back to him that she could by no means get money for the anonymous venture (the joke of the Original Papers turning of course on the reality of Mr. Ephraim Barnett, their editor and reporter), Landor had discovered gaming to be the cause of his school-fellow's distress, and no longer cared to get money for him. Just as content, therefore, to pay for printing as to be paid for printing, his book crept into the world unrecompensed and unannounced in the autumn of 1834.

I did my best then to draw attention to it; but the popularity of the subject has not made it an exception to Landor's works in general, and what has been done for them remains here also necessary. By such passages as could be taken without impairment of their beauty, however, I could not hope to convey an approximate impression of what the book really is. Even if its richness of humour could be displayed, the variety of its wit, and what it presents of a very rare union of the higher order of imagination to pathos as well as character of the simplest kind, there would be something beyond all this, untold and still to be discovered. As Marlowe defied the combined powers of the poets to do justice to the face of his mistress, for that the highest reaches of a human wit might be attained by them, and

'Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the best
Which into words no virtue can digest;'

so one finds here. There is a subtlety of genius as of beauty that escapes when we would fix the expression of any special charm; but at least one thing can be truly said of the book, that with its very grain and tissue there is interwoven a purpose profoundly human. It is steeped in the deepest waters of humanity. It would have been characterised as gentle when the word meant all that is noble as well as mild and wise.

There has been nothing written about Shakespeare so worthy. of surviving; and whatever becomes of it now, its final place will probably be found near that everlasting name.

Its plan is the simplest possible. Excepting the justice and the culprit, the only persons present at the examination are the justice's chaplain Sir Silas Gough, his clerk Mr. Ephraim Barnett who reports it, and the two countrymen who watched Shakespeare and his fellows in the forest and give evidence of the offence, Joseph Carnaby and Euseby Treen. It is an hour before noontide in the great hall at Charlecote, and the case is proceeding as an ordinary sessions matter, when suddenly, one hardly understands how, the offence of the culprit has become nothing, and the culprit himself everything: for justice, chaplain, witnesses, reporter, all without seeming to intend it, are but adding in their several ways to the interest he has contrived to awaken; and even the anger of the worshipful knight, which had fallen heavily on him at first for his girdings at the chaplain, only succeeds in so finding utterance as to foreshadow something humorously different.

Young man, I perceive that if I do not stop thee in thy courses, thy name, being involved in thy company's, may one day or other reach across the county; and folks may handle it and turn it about, as it deserveth, from Coleshill to Nuneaton, from Bromwicham to Brownsover. And who knoweth but that, years after thy death, the very house wherein thou wert born may be pointed at and commented on by knots of people, gentle and simple! What a shame for an honest man's son! . . . But with God's blessing the hundred shall be rid of thee, nay the whole shire. We will have none such in our county: we justices are agreed upon it, and will keep our word now and forevermore. Woe betide any that resembles thee in any part of him!'

When the evidence comes to be taken, the witnesses have less to tell of seeing Willy in Charlecote-park helping to carry off the deer, than of hearing him with his wonderful talk frighten his companions in its moonlit glades; and a few touches reproduce the scene so vividly that we seem ourselves to have part in his strange vagaries, his Windsor whimsies, his Italian girl's nursery sighs, his Pucks and pinchings, his sleep under the oaks in the ancient forest of Arden, and his waking from sleep in the Tempest far at sea. But the witnesses have not more difficulty in their effort to prove the offence than the worshipful Sir Thomas

in his resolve to punish the offender. 'I cannot fix my eyes (as one would say) on the shifting and sudden shade-and-shine, ' which cometh back to me, do what I will, and mazes me in a

manner and blinks me.' The end of it is therefore that the warrant of commitment is put aside, and the lad has a lecture read to him, instead, upon his ill character in the county; that he is dissolute and light, much given to mummeries and mysteries, wakes and carousals, cudgel-fighters, mountebanks, and wanton women; also that it was said of him (his worship hoped this might be without foundation) that he enacted parts, and not simply of foresters and fairies, girls in the green-sickness and friars, lawyers and outlaws, but likewise, having small reverence for station, of kings and queens, knights and privycouncillors, in all their glory. 'Reason and ruminate with thy'self now,' he adds, as the chaplain declares folks had been consumed at the stake for pettier felonies, and Willy holds down his head :

'Canst thou believe it to be innocent to counterfeit kings and queens? Supposest thou that if the impression of their faces on a farthing be felonious and ropeworthy, the imitation of head and body, voice and bearing, plume and strut, crown and mantle, and everything else that maketh them royal and glorious, be aught less? Perpend, young man, perpend. Consider who among inferior mortals shall imitate them becomingly? Dreamest thou they talk and act like checkmen at Banbury fair? How can thy shallow brain suffice for their vast conceptions? How darest thou say, as they do, Hang this fellow, Quarter that; flay, mutilate, stab, shoot, press, hook, torture, burn alive? These are royalties. Who appointed thee to

such office?'

But I may not indulge myself by farther description. Profuse as are the striking thoughts and images in the book, and wonderful everywhere the fitness and felicity of its style, its higher wealth of imagination and wit is inseparable from the subtlety of its art and design. A true book suffers and fades when only the good things of its author are made prominent; but, taken each at its worth, all here are so very masterly that nothing remains to be said of a writer from whom such things drop so abundantly on any subject that engages him, than that, however distant be his full inheritance of fame, he can afford to wait the time. One more extract alone shall be taken, and not from the Examination itself. To it are appended by its reporter,

upon the relation of one of the retainers of the Earl of Essex, not only a conference on the condition of Ireland between the earl and Master Edmund Spenser, but also a delightful sketch of the burial of Spenser shortly afterwards in Westminster Abbey. What follows, on the common lot, is from the Conference.

'Look at any old mansion-house, and let the sun shine as gloriously as it may on the golden vanes, or the arms recently quartered over the gateway, or the embayed window, and on the happy pair that haply is toying at it; nevertheless thou mayest say that of a certainty the same fabric hath seen much sorrow within its chambers, and heard many wailings : and each time this was the heaviest stroke of all. Funerals have passed along through the stout-hearted knights upon the wainscot, and amid the laughing nymphs upon the arras. Old servants have shaken their heads, as if somebody had deceived them, when they found that beauty and nobility could perish. Edmund, the things that are too true pass by us as if they were not true at all; and when they have singled us out, then only do they strike us.'

Landor justly valued this Dialogue, and was in great alarm on hearing from England that the friends who had charge of the printing could not understand why the same volume should contain both it and the Examination. Expressly for this, he wrote to Lady Blessington (11th of October 1834): 'I have written an 'Introduction which quite satisfied me; which hardly anything 'does upon the whole, though everything in part. Pray relieve me, then, from this teasing anxiety, for the Examination and 'the Conference if disjoined would break my heart.' He had his wish; yet wellnigh broke his heart notwithstanding, on seeing the printed book. 'I hope,' he wrote to Southey, 'my pub'lisher sent you the Examination of Shakespeare,-alas that I should say it the very worst-printed book that ever fell into my hands. "Volubly discreet"! "slipped into" for "stripped "unto"! "Sit mute" for "stand;" with many, many others! And then there are words I never use, such as utmost ;" I always write "uttermost." In fact the misprints amount to forty of the grosser kind, and I know not how many of the 'smaller!' He added, with kindly allusion to the notice I had written of it, that if a friendly report of the thing had not put him in good humour before it reached him, he would have flung it into the fire then and there, and dismissed it from his thoughts forever.

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