FullReads

In the course of this disquisition, you have often smiled at “all such reading as was never read”: and possibly I may have indulged it too far: but it is the reading necessary for a Comment on Shakespeare. Those who apply solely to the Ancients for this purpose, may with equal wisdom study the TALMUD for an Exposition of TRISTRAM SHANDY. Nothing but an intimate acquaintance with the Writers of the time, who are frequently of no other value, can point out his allusions, and ascertain his Phraseology. The Reformers of his Text are for ever equally positive, and equally wrong. The Cant of the Age, a provincial Expression, an obscure Proverb, an obsolete Custom, a Hint at a Person or a Fact no longer remembered, hath continually defeated the best of our Guessers : You must not suppose me to speak at random, when I assure you that, from some forgotten book or other, I can demonstrate this to you in many hundred Places; and I almost wish that I had not been persuaded into a different Employment.

Tho’ I have as much of the Natale Solum about me as any man whatsoever; yet, I own, the Primrose Path is still more pleasing than the Fosse or the Watling Street :

Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale
It’s infinite variety.—-

And when I am fairly rid of the Dust of topographical Antiquity, which hath continued much longer about me than I expected, you may very probably be troubled again with the ever fruitful Subject of SHAKESPEARE and his COMMENTATORS.

NOTES:

Joseph Cradock (1742-1826) had been a student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He left the University without a degree, but in 1765 was granted the honorary degree of M.A. by the Chancellor, the Duke of Newcastle. His Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs appeared in 1828.

162. ” Were it shewn ” says some one. See the review of Farmer’s Essay in the Critical Review of January, 1767 (vol. xxiii., p. 50).

163. Peter Burman (1668-1741), Professor at Utrecht and at Leyden; editor of Horace, Ovid, Lucan, Quintilian, and other Latin classics.

” Truly,” as Mr. Dogberry says. Much Ado, iii. 5. 22.

Burgersdicius,–Franco Burgersdijck (1590-1629), Dutch logician, Professor at Leyden. His Institutionum logicarum libri duo was for long a standard text-book. Cf. Goldsmith, Life of Parnell, ad init. : “His progress through the college course of study was probably marked with but little splendour; his imagination might have been too warm to relish the cold logic of Burgersdicius.” See also the Dunciad, iv. 198.

Locke. This paragraph is a reply to an argument in the Critical Review (xxiii., pp. 47, 48).

Quotation from Lilly. See p. 201.

the Water-poet, John Taylor (1580-1653); cf. Farmer’s note, p. 212.

The quotation is from Taylor’s Motto (Spenser Society Reprint of Folio of 1630, p. 217):–

I was well entred (forty Winters since)
As far as possum in my Accidence ;
And reading but from possum to posset,
There I was mir’d, and could no further get.

In his Thiefe he says “all my schollership is schullership” ( id., p. 282).

164. held horses at the door of the playhouse. This anecdote was given in Theophilus Cibber’s Lives of the Poets, 1753, i., p. 130. Johnson appended it, in his edition, to Rowe’s
Account of Shakespeare (ed. 1765, p. clii), and it was printed in the same year in the Gentleman’s Magazine (xxxv., p. 475). The story was told to Pope by Rowe, who got it from Betterton, who in turn had heard it from Davenant; but Rowe wisely doubted its authenticity and did not insert it in his Account (see the Variorum edition of 1803, i., pp. 120-122).–Farmer makes fun of it here,–and uses it to vary the Critical reviewer’s description–“as naked with respect to all literary merit as he was when he first went under the ferula” ( Crit. Rev. xxiii., p. 50).