466 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[Dec. 15. 1855. 



P. 240. ; 



" How bold is sin and hell, that yet it dare 

 Kise against us ! " 



(Unaltered.) 



The IViumphs of Love and Antiquity, p. 278. : 



" The time and truth appear." 



(Altered from appeares of old ed.) 

 P. 285. : 



"Anno 1381. Queen Anne, his wife (K. Richard II. 's), 

 daughter to the Emperor Charles the Fourth, and sister to 

 [the] Emperor Wenceslaus, whose modesty then may 

 make this age blush now, she being the first that taught 

 ■women to ride sideling on horseback ; but who it was 

 that taught 'em to ride straddling there is no records so 

 immodest that can shew me, only the impudent time and 

 the open profession." 



(Unaltered.) 

 The Sun in Aries, p. 298. : 



•'..,. such is Truth, 

 Whose strength and grace feel a perpetual youth." 



(Altered from feels of old ed.) 



The Triumphs of Integrity, p. 311.: 



" . . . . 'tis the life and dying 

 Crowns both with honour's sacred satisfying." 



(Unaltered.) 

 P. 314. : 



" For 'tis not shows, pomp, nor a house of state 

 Curiously deck'd, that makes a magistrate; 

 'Tis his fair, noble soul, his wisdom, cai-e. 

 His upright justness to the oath he aware. 

 Gives him complete." 



(Unaltered.) 



My task is ended ; the product can hardly have 

 been so irksome for a reader to glance over as the 

 execution of it has been to me to compass. Let 

 it not be supposed, however, that Mr. D'Israeli's 

 law of English syntax is thus abundantly ignored 

 by Middleton alone; well nigh all contemporary 

 writers, whether in prose or verse, e.xhibit equal 

 independence of any such controlling statute. To 

 Mr. Dyce's hyper-criticism it is that this author 

 is beholden for notoriety as an habitual trespasser 

 against a canon, whereof he was not cognizant, 

 and about which the more solid wisdom of an age, 

 rather intent upon the pregnancy and appo- 

 siteness of the subject-matter, than curious to 

 •write by the card of stereotyped grammar rules, 

 was not likely to waste a thouglit. Herein may 

 his fellow-dramatist, Shakspeare, be counted happy, 

 that his numerous aberrations from Mr. D'Is- 

 raeli's canon have hitherto, in every instance, 

 escaped the officious pedantry of the corrector — 

 an accident the more noteworthy when one calls 

 to mind that divers partial attempts have been 

 made to adjust to the popular standard of gram- 

 mar certain other alleged contraventions of it, to 

 be met with more than once or twice in nearly all 

 his plays ; and as to what would be styled, in 

 technical phrase, the ellipses and anacolutha of 

 speech, which constitute the natural dialect of 

 passion, — the prone and speechless eloquence of 

 Ko. 320.] 



the head and heart pleading with an energy and 

 pathos inexpressible by an artificial code of gram- 

 mar rules, itself compiled from the ordinary issues 

 of both, not to stint the extraordinary workings of 

 either, nor to brand sentences as corrupt for gram- 

 matical incoherence, nor to make form instead 

 of substance the criterion of gibberish, — that his 

 works have undergone every conceivable variety 

 of mutilation at the hands of a countless horde of 

 commentators, including men whose learning and 

 judgment offer some faint shadow of a plea for in- 

 terference with the recorded text, as well as that 

 more numerous class, whose only excuse for the 

 like license must be fetched from the venturesome- 

 ness of insufficienc}', betrayed by the itching am- 

 bition of a character for corrective ingenuity into 

 the fatal mistake of making felicitous conjectures 

 supersede the unwelcome exactions of laborious 

 research ; and as Shakspeare has heretofore es- 

 caped this violation of his text, let us hope that no 

 future commentator, either old or new, will here- 

 after be found hardy enough to disfigure his 

 writings with similar grammatical anachronisms, 

 by forcing the syntax of the nineteenth to sup- 

 plant that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- 

 ries. \V. R. Aruowsmith. 

 Broad Heath, Presteign. 



PBOFESSOB VON BAUMEr's " LETTEBS ON ENGLAND 



IN 1835," 



When an editor or translator is candid and in- 

 dustrious enough to point out and correct his au- 

 thor's mistakes, the supposition that he has felt 

 constrained to do this by a sense of duty, especially 

 if the author be living, will naturally gain for him 

 the reader's confidence ; so that if his corrections 

 are mistakes, they are very likely to perpetuate 

 errors. 



In vol. iii. of Prof, von Raumer's England in 

 1835, translated for Murray by H. E. Lloyd, 1836, 

 Letter Ixv. treats of English finances ; and the 

 professor has not cited his authority, when it was 

 evidently Colquhoun's Treatise on the Wealth, Sec. 

 of the Brit. Empire, published in 1814, a work of 

 some reputation. Of this the translator appears 

 to have been unaware, and has given the readers 

 a note, declaring that there must be a mistake, 

 where there was probably none ; and overlooking 

 a palpable clerical error, which Raumer had 

 copied from Colquhoun without detecting it. 



The subject is the revenue and expenditure of 

 the government in Queen Anne's reign ; and 

 Colquhoun says, " Queen Anne's wars cost, on an 

 average, 4,336,000Z. a year," and " her peace esta- 

 blisiiment may be thus stated — total, 1,965,605Z." 

 The translator of Von Raumer says (p. 273.), 

 " Under the reign of Queen Anne, a year of peace 

 cost 2,000,0O0Z. ; and a year of war 4,336,000/," 



