LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 373 



' And yet the rib, as I suppose, 

 That God did take out of the man 

 A dog vp caught, and a way gose 

 Eat it clene ; so that as than 

 The woork to finish that God began 

 Could not be, as we haue said, 

 Because the dog the rib conuaid. 



A remedy God found as yet; 

 Out of the dog he took a rib." 



Mr. Hazlitt has a long note on way gose, of which the 

 first sentence shall suffice us : " The origin of the term 

 way-goose is involved in some obscurity." We should 

 think so, to be sure ! Let us modernize the spelling and 

 grammar, and correct the punctuation, and then see how 

 it looks : 



" A dog up caught and away goes, 

 Eats it up." 



We will ask Mr. Hazlitt to compare the text, as he 

 prints it, with 



" Into the hall he gose." ( Vol. III. p. 67.) 



We should have expected a note here on the " hall he- 

 goose." Not to speak of the point of the joke, such as 

 it is, a goose that could eat up a man's rib could only 

 be matched by one that could swallow such a note, or 

 write it ! 



We have made but a small florilegitim from Mr. Haz- 

 litt's remarkable volumes. His editorial method seems 

 to have been to print as the Lord would, till his eye was 

 caught by some word he did not understand, and then to 

 make the reader comfortable by a note showing that the 

 editor is as much in the dark as he. We are profoundly 

 thankful for the omission of a glossary. It would have 

 been a nursery and seminary of blunder. To expose pre- 

 tentious charlatanry is sometimes the unpleasant duty of 

 a reviewer. It is a duty we never seek, and should not 

 have assumed in this case but for the impertinence with 



