deep tones of the funeral bell. Thus, in the Second Part of King Henry the Fourth And his tongue Sounds ever after as a sullen bell Remembered tolling a departed friend : and in the Seventy-First of his beautiful Sonnets: No longer mourn for me when I am dead From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell. Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it.— We have suffered a great deal of the poetry of life and manners to slip away from us; and few, in these times, had ever the opportunity of being placed in such a scene as that which the King conjured up before the mind of Hubert. There is so much in this Play which shews that the mind of the Poet was intent, when he wrote it, on affairs connected with the church, that it may be submitted as a probability not at once to be rejected, that in thus placing Hubert in imagination in a scene of horror, to prepare him for conceiving and executing a deed of horror, the Poet had in his mind what was alleged to be a practice of the Jesuits of the time. They had their "Chamber of Meditation," as they called it, in which they placed men who were "to undertake some great business of moment, as to kill a King, or the like." "It was a melancholy dark chamber, where he had no light for many days together, no company, little meat, ghastly pictures of devils all about him," and "by this strange usage they made him quite mad, and beside himself."* The word "Convertite," which occurs in this Play, is an ecclesiastical term, with a peculiar and express meaning, distinct from "Convert." It denotes a person who, having relapsed, has been recovered, and this, it will be perceived, is the sense in which Shakespeare uses it: It was my breath that blew the tempest up Upon your stubborn usage of the Pope : My tongue shall hush again this storm of war, Marlowe, with less propriety, uses it as synonymous with convert, BARABAS.-No, Governor, I will be no convertite. Jew of Malta, Act i. Owen, in his Running Register, 4to. 1626, p. 44, speaks of "our English Convertites, as they call them," meaning Englishmen originally of the Reformed Church who had been reconciled to the Church at Rome. We have a passage in this Play which must for ever decide the question whether the Poet, when he wrote it, was a member of the Roman Church, or favourable to any scheme for its regaining its supremacy in England. The passage is this And blessed shall he be that doth revolt It is a speech of Pandulf. Shakespeare, it may be said, is only writing in the character of the speaker, as a dramatist ought to do. But if he had been a favourer of the system which many in his day would gladly have seen restored, he would not have put into the mouth of the representative of the Church a doctrine which the enemies of the Church attributed to its authorities, charged them with encouraging, while it is a doctrine which strikes at the root of all personal security, and is shocking to the common sense of right and wrong. If he had been at all solicitous for the honour of the Church, he would have qualified and screened such a sentiment as this, or rather, he would have suppressed it altogether and that he has done neither the one nor the other, is a plain proof that he did not scruple to expose to the execration of the people the darkest parts of the system, and do his part to keep in mind that such extreme opinions might be cherished in the Church. If he himself secretly approved of them, which we cannot believe, he still would not have cared to expose them in all their native deformity. It should be remembered that something like encouragement was actually held out to take the life of Queen Elizabeth, or, at least, her ministers chose to have it thought so. 16 KING RICHARD THE SECOND. I. 1. NORFOLK. Which to maintain, I would allow him odds; And meet him, were I tied to run a-foot Even to the frozen ridges of the Alps, Or any other ground INHABITABLE, Where ever Englishman durst set his foot. It seems superfluous to cite other authorities than those already adduced for " inhabitable" being used where we now write uninhabitable; but as the change which this word has undergone illustrates the little care that was taken to preserve the purity of the English language in the century which succeeded the time of Shakespeare, a few others may not uselessly be added. Deserte forsaken or left inhabit.-PALSGRAVE. For they were all drawn into the forest of Gedworth, the which was inhabitable.-LORD BERNERS' Translation of FROISSART, p. 38. Former writers would have the Zones inhabitable; we find them by experience temperate.-FELTHAM'S RESOLVES, p. 27. We now prefix a second negative particle, and speak of an uninhabited house, an uninhabitable country. II. 1. GAUNT. This fortress built by Nature for herself, This is a most extraordinary interference with the genuine text of Shakespeare: for not only does the word "infection," which appears in all the editions quarto or folio, afford a sufficiently good sense, but it is supplanted by a word for which no authority can be produced that it was ever a word used in England, and which yields no sense, or at least none that can be regarded as to be preferred. The sea is some defence against pestilential infections: it is also a defence against moral infections, which probably were intended. The passage is quoted in England's Parnassus, 1600, where the word is printed "intestion ;" and this misprint has been the origin of the corruption in this place of Shakespeare's text. The following passage in the Dedication of The Running Register to Sir Julius Cæsar, by Lewis Owen, 1626, may be brought in support of the probability that moral not natural infection was what Shakespeare meant. Having in my many years travell in forain countries seene with mine eyes, and by conference with others learned, the state of the colleges, seminaries, and cloisters which our English Fugitives have in all those forraine parts, together with some part of their practices, impostures, cozenage, and deceits, their whole drifte being to alienate the hearts of his Majesty's subjects from their allegiance, and to possess them with the filthy dregs of Spanish infection and Popish superstition. II. 1. NORTHUMBERLAND. [The son of Richard Earl of Arundel,] That late broke from the Duke of Exeter. This line is supplied by Mr. Malone, there being nothing correspondent to it in any of the old copies. That a line expressing what is here expressed is necessary, and must once have existed, unless we are to suppose that the poet wrote with most unwonted carelessness, appears from these two considerations: (1) that without it the line, His brother, archbishop late of Canterbury, would refer to a brother of the Duke of Exeter, or less probably of Lord Cobham or the Earl of Hereford, while it is certain that none of these noblemen had a brother who was Archbishop of Canterbury, and that Archbishop Arundel of the time was brother of the Earl of Arundel. (2) When Shakespeare wrote this speech of the Earl of Northumber с |