LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 231 



The dog runs eagerly after the bread, pulls up the root, and falls 

 stricken dead by its groan of pain. 



These, we believe, are the only instances in which Mr. Hal- 

 liwell has ventured to give any opinion upon the text, except as 

 to a palpable misprint, here and there. Two of these we have 

 already cited. There is one other p. 46, line 10. Inconstant. 

 An error for inconstant. Wherever there is a real difficulty, he 

 leaves us in the lurch. For example, in &amp;lt; What you Will, he 

 prints without comment 



Ha ! he mount Chirall on the wings of fame ! 



Vol. i. p. 239. 



which should be mount cheval, as it is given in Mr. Dilke s 

 edition (Old English Plays, vol. ii. p. 222). We cite this, not 

 as the worst, but the shortest, example at hand. 



Some of Mr. Halliwell s notes are useful and interesting as 

 that on keeling the pot/ and a few others ; but the greater part 

 are utterly useless. He thinks it necessary, for instance, to ex 

 plain that to speak pure foole, is in sense equivalent to &quot;I will 

 speak like a pure fool,&quot; that belkt up means belched up 

 that aprecocks means apricots. He has notes also upon 

 * meal-mouthed, luxuriousnesse, termagant, fico, estro, * a 

 nest of goblets, which indicate either that the general reader 

 is a less intelligent person in England than in America, or that 

 Mr. Halliwell s standard of scholarship is very low. We our 

 selves, from our limited reading, can supply him with a refer 

 ence which will explain the allusion to the Scotch barnacle 

 much better than his citations from Sir John Maundeville and 

 Giraldus Cambrensis namely, note 8, on page 179 of a Treatise 

 on Worms, by Dr. Ramesey, court physician to Charles II. 



We turn now to Mr. Hazlitt s edition of Webster. We wish 

 he had chosen Chapman; for Mr. Dyce s Webster is hardly out 

 of print, and, we believe, has just gone through a second and 

 revised edition. Webster was a far more considerable man than 

 Marston, and infinitely above him in genius. Without the poetic 

 nature of Marlowe, or Chapman s somewhat unwieldy vigour of 

 thought, he had that inflammability of mind which, untempered 

 by a solid understanding, made his plays a strange mixture of 

 vivid expression, incoherent declamation, dramatic intensity, 

 and extravagant conception of character. He was not, in the 

 highest sense of the word, a great dramatist. Shakspeare is 

 the only one of that age. Marlowe had a rare imagination, a 

 delicacy of sense that made him the teacher of Shakspeare and 



