254 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS, 



of Castriot an ass s jawbone is a little too bad. We refer Mr. 

 Hazlitt to The Life of George Castriot, King of Epirus and 

 Albania/ &c., &c. (Edinburgh, 1753), p. 32, for an explanation 

 of this profound difficulty. He will there find that the Turkish 

 soldiers wore relics of Scanderbeg as charms. 



Perhaps Mr. Hazlitt s most astounding note is on the word 

 pickear. (p. 203). 



So within shot she doth pickear, 



Now gall s [galls] the flank and now the rear. 



1 In the sense in which it is here used this word seems to be 

 peculiar to Lovelace. To pickear, or pickeer^ means to skir 

 mish? And, pray, what other possible meaning can it have here ? 



Of his corrections of the press we will correct a few samples. 



Page 34, for Love nee &amp;gt; re\\\s standard/ read neere. Page 

 82, for fall too? read fall to (or, as we ought to print such 

 words, fall-to ). Page 83, for star-made firmament/ read 

 1 star, made firmament/ Page 161, for To look their enemies 

 in their hearse/ read, both for sense and metre, into. Page 

 176, for the gods have kneeled/ read had. Page 182, for In 

 beds they tumbled off their own/ read of. Page 184, for in 

 mine one monument I lie/ read owne. Page 212, for Deuca 

 lion s /tfv&flung stone/ read backflung. Of the punctuation 

 we shall give but one specimen, and that a fair average one : 



Naso to his Tibullus flung the wreath, 

 He to Catullus thus did each bequeath. 

 This glorious circle, to another round, 

 At last the temples of a god it bound. 



Our readers over ten years of age will easily correct this for 

 themselves. 



Time brings to obscure authors * an odd kind of reparation, 

 an immortality, not of love and interest and admiration, but of 

 curiosity merely. In proportion as their language was uncouth, 

 provincial, or even barbarous, their value becomes the greater. 

 A book of which only a single copy escaped its natural enemies, 

 the pastry-cook and trunk-maker, may contain one word that 

 makes daylight in some dark passage of a great author, and 

 its name shall accordingly live for ever in a note. Is not, 

 then, a scholiastic athanasy better than none ? And if literary 

 vanity survive death, or even worse, as Brunetto Latini s made 

 him insensible for a moment to the rain of fire and the burning 

 sand, the authors of such books as are not properly literature 



* Early Popular Poetry. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. 



