Amenities of Literature; Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature Volume 2

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1864 edition. Excerpt: ... There is one more remarkable object in the Shakespeare of Warburton. He not only preserved that strange device of Pope, to distinguish the most beautiful passages by inverted commas, but carried on that ridiculous process on his own separate account by marking his favorites by double comma. It is evident that these great editors judged Shakespeare by these fragmentary and unconnected passages, which could not indicate the harmonious and gradual rise of the thoughts, nor the fine transitions of emotions, and less the comprehensive genius, of the inventor. They were scattering the living See " Quarrels of Authors." members which must be viewed whole with aD their movements, and at last must be sought for by the reader in his own mind. The truest mode of discovering the beauties of an author is first to be conversant with the beautiful; otherwise it is possible that the beauties may escape the readers, even should they be marked by a Pope or a Warburton. The acknowledged failure of the preceding editions invited to a fresh enterprise; and it was the edition of Johnson, in 1765, which conferred on Shakespeare the stahility of a classic, by the vigor and discrimination of his criticism, and the solemnity of his judicial decisions. When Johnson had issued his proposals twenty years before for an edition of Shakespeare, he pointed to a great novelty for the elucidation of the poet. His intuitive sagacity had discerned that a poet so racy and native required a familiarity both with the idiom and the manners of his age. He was sensible that a complete explanation of an author, not systematic and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and slight hints, is not to be expected from any single scholiast. He enumerates,...