SATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 1884.

No. 611, New Series.

THE EDITOR cannot undertake to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected manuscript.

It is particularly requested that all business letters regarding the supply of the paper, e., may be addressed to the PUBLISHER, and

not to the EDITOR.

essay on "The Two Noble Kinsmen ; " and retribution overtakes him when a few pages farther he cites a forged document as fixing the downward date of "The Tempest.' Pedantry may blind us; but self-complacent common-sense can sometimes throw a pinch of dust in our eyes. If Mr. White persuades himself that with the aid of his notes, useful as they are, an ordinary reader can understand what Shakspere wrote "as nearly as possible in the very way in which he would have understood and enjoyed it if he had lived in London in the reign of James I.," he simply is blinded by a liberal pinch of dust thrown in his eyes by common-sense. I am on the side of the pedants. To acquire an instinctive The Riverside Shakespeare. The Text newly feeling for Elizabethan language, versification, Edited, with Glossarial, Historical, and Ex-style, you must, like Dyce, live in Elizabethan planatory Notes, by Richard Grant White. literature; you must so saturate yourself with In 3 vols. (Sampson Low.) it that it colours your bones as madder does the bones of a pig; and even then your inShakspeare's Historical Plays, Roman and stinct will not be infallible. English. With Revised Text, Introductions, and Notes Glossarial, Critical, and Historical, by Charles Wordsworth, Bishop of St. Andrews. Vols. II. and III. (Blackwood.)

LITERATURE.

NEW EDITIONS OF SHAKSPERE.

It is unnecessary to say that Mr. Grant White's edition of Shakspere is the work of a skilled and acute scholar, who determines to look at things with his own eyes, and not through a succession of commentators' spectacles. Such work is always interesting, whether we agree or do not agree with the results arrived at. The edition, while it is the work of a scholar, aims at popular uses. If that incalculable person, "the general reader," find that it meets a want, Shakspere students may be well pleased. For his benefit it is right to describe what he will get in exchange for his six-and-thirty shillings. He will get three stout volumes of nine hundred or a thousand pages each; the text printed in a single lumn, and in a pleasant, readable type; in the first volume the Comedies arranged as in the First Folio; in the second, the Histories, to which the Poems are added; in the third, the Tragedies, real and so-called, including "Troilus and Cressida," "Cymbeline," and "Pericles." He will further get a general Preface chiefly occupied with setting forth some examples of Mr. Grant White's improvements, real or supposed, in the text; a brief Life of Shakspere; introductions to each play, averaging from half a page to a page in length; finally, foot-notes, in rare instances critical, more often glossarial, all being reduced to a minimum. Mr. Grant White has minimised his minimum with a vengeance.

Mr. White, "following eminent example, took the advice of his washerwoman" in determining what passages were sufficiently obscure to justify explanation. We are delighted to hear this; we have always admired the fine culture of the American democracy, but to discover that the bleachers of summer smocks are joint-editors of Shakspere comes as a surprise. I imagine Mr. White's collaborateur as charming as one of Mr. Abbey's milk-maids; I see the perplexed scholar strolling across the meadow, with proof-sheets in his hand, to where her fairer sheets are swaying in the wind, and there she enlightens him so prettily ("most busy less, when she does it") on "ullorxa," and "esil," and "empirickqutick," and "cride game," and "runaway's eyes," her voice mingling with the voice of the river. Mr. White and the whitster, not of Datchet-mead and Thames side, but of the trans-Atlantic Riverside, find Shakspere charmingly free from obscurity! In the "Merry Wives" there is no note on "buck" or "buckbasket," and that is easy to understand; but that "a 'oman which is in the manner of his nurse, or his dry-nurse, or his cook, or his laundry, his washer and his wringer" should find so many other things easy which have seemed difficult to Capell, Malone, and Dyce is matter of pleasant congratulation. Many washerwomen have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all! The truth is that an ordinary, off-hand reader of Shakspere finds few difficulties, because he is unaware of his own ignorance; and the explanation of half the useless commentatorship is that, when we look into it, Shakspere is in a thousand instances difficult or obscure, and in the dimness we lose our way, excusably enough, in wandering mazes lost.

I am in favour of a text without notes, or a text with many notes; let us not puzzle at all, let us puzzle out every difficulty. It seems to me to be the pedantry of common-sense to To glance here and there at a few points in think scorn of the services of those editors, detail. Among the notes on the Sonnets are annotators, commentators, critics, whom Mr. two which show Mr. White at his best and White dismisses as mere dullards and drivellers, worst. His emendation of the last line of but to each of whom we actually owe some sonnet cxiii.grain, perhaps several grains, of fruitful fact or thought. One of them grubs among blacketter books, one has a genius for textual njecture, one has a delicate ear for verse; h and all have served us, and we owe them thanks, not scorn. An editor of Shakspere, wever gifted, insults his reader when he Lounces, as Mr. White does, that he has ever taken the trouble to read Spalding's

'My most true mind thus maketh mind untrue".

seems to me to rank well among the con-
jectural emendations of the Quarto reading,
"My most true mind thus maketh mine untrue."
On the lines in sonnet cxxvii.-

"They [her eyes] mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland'ring creation with a false esteem,”-

Mr. White notes, "No beauty lack. The sense seems to require all beauty lack;' and a negative assertion seems always to have disturbed S.'s coherence of thought." It is really W.'s, and not S.'s, coherence of thought which is disturbed. Those not born fair lack no beauty, because they wear false hair, and paint themselves beautiful for ever; hence my dark lady's eyes are in mourning. A real example of Shakspere's well-known confusion in the use of negatives, especially frequent in the case of no less, unnoticed by Mr. White, and, so far as I know, by other critics, is the following:-In "As You Like It" (V. iv.), Duke Senior exclaims, in welcoming Celia

"O my dear niece, welcome thou art to me! Even daughter welcome, in no less degree."

Theobald, Sidney Walker, and Dyce place a hyphen between "daughter" and "welcome, making this a compound noun, the Duke offering his niece a daughter-welcome. But is not Shakspere here at his old trick of blundering about no less, and does he not mean "Even a daughter is welcome in no higher degree than you, my niece"? Turning a few pages back to the puzzling Ducdame of Jaques's song, I find that Mr. White alters it to Ducadme, and adds the note "Ducadme

bring to me (Lat.)." I have elsewhere thrown out the conjecture that Jaques's Ducdame is simply the French duc damné. Jaques is railing against the Duke and his followers-asses who have left wealth and ease, 'a stubborn will to please." He has been all day avoiding the Duke, and he has just been told that the Duke is coming to drink under the tree which Jaques has appropriated. "Ducdame " is "a Greek invocation," because it is not Greek, but the French of Arden woods; "to call fools into a circle," for the Duke has gathered asses and fools around him. Jaques will go to sleep if he can; if he cannot, he will rail against all the first-born of Egypt. Why "first-born of Egypt "? Because Duke Senior, the elder brother, is the object of Jaques's spleen, and would that the plague of Egypt took him!

In the same play (III. ii.) I am glad to see Mr. White retaining Rosalind's "O most gentle Jupiter," and refusing to admit the specious "gentle pulpiter" of Mr. Spedding. But why alter (IV. i.) "and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was- -Hero of Sestos" to "foolish coroners"? the jest lies in an allusion to a coroner's inquest; but this is sufficiently indicated by the word "found," and the jurymen are, very properly, the chroniclers.

Of course

May I be bold to think these spirits?" asks Ferdinand in "The Tempest (IV. i.), and Prospero answers,

Fer.

"Spirits which by mine art

I have from their confines call'd to enact

My present fancies.

Let me live here ever;
So rare a wonder'd father and a wife
Makes this place Paradise."

Wife or wise? for, I believe, copies of the
First Folio differ on this point. Mr. White
reads wise, and perhaps he is right. But may
not Ferdinand on this solitary island imagine
himself, as it were, in Eden? He is Adam,
and Miranda is his Eve, while, with all
reverence, this wondered father who can call
spirits from their confines is an earthly Pro-

good rest," as a separate poem from the three Horn, and abolish the bugbear that for censtanzas beginning turies had perched upon its cliffs." Gordon entered the Royal Engineers at an early age, and arrived in the Crimea on New Year's Day 1855, when he was within a few weeks of completing his twenty-second year. He had his share of personal adventures and narrow escapes during his work in the trenches; and be added that he then formed a poor opinion of the quality of French soldiers, and a rather high one of the steadiness and devotion of the Russians. After the war he

the Chinese generals in response to Gordon's appeals for lenience. Not merely did this breach of faith disgust Gordon, but it involved him in the most imminent personal danger. Hastening to the residence of one of the principal Wangs, to see what he could do, “he was at once surrounded by some thousands of armed Taipings, who shut the gates on him as he went in, and declined to allow him to send out his interpreter with a message to his troops. Fortunately, it happened that the Taipings no more knew than Gordon himself that their chiefs had been put to death. Had they done so they would have held Gordon responsible, and might have put him to torture. As it was, they held him as a hostage for the good treatment of their leaders. He was kept powerless in the palace from the afternoon of the 6th till the morning of the next day, surrounded by Taipings.... Few men have looked upon death under circumstances so intricate and so threatening."

Gordon was honoured by the Chinese Government with the rank of Titu, and received presents of the yellow riding-dress and peacock's feather that are the highest dignities it can bestow; but he emphatically refused all pecuniary reward. During his service with the Chinese he had learnt to appreciate their virtues and to make allowances for their faults. Even the treachery at Soochow, which had at the time filled him with such wrath that he contemplated exacting a personal revenge for it, came to be regarded with a more lenient and discriminating eye as a natural incident of Chinese history. We cannot refrain from closing the record of his Chinese career with the following very wise words on the subject of the ruling and the ruled in China :

"It is absurd to talk about Manchoos and Chinese; the former are extinct, and the latter are in every part. And it is equally absurd to Tak of the Mandarins as a class distinct from the people of the country; they are not so, but re merely the officials who hold offices which are obtainable by every Chinese without respect t birth-I will not say money, as certainly ere is some amount of corruption in the sale foffices; but Russia is equally corrupt, for that matter, in her distant provinces, and it is Let so very long ago that we were also somewhat tainted in the same way."

chalk on the fences. A favourite legend was
God bless the Kernel.'”

For such a man it was but the most natural
thing in the world to deface the inscription
on a gold medal presented to him by the
Empress of China, to dispose of it for ten
pounds, and to send the proceeds anonymously
to the fund for the distressed operatives in
Lancashire! The revelation of these facts
will be very hateful to him, and Mr. Hake's
courage will be tried by the momentary wrath
it may produce; but the world must be the
better and the wiser for the knowledge of the
details of Gen. Gordon's life which he would
fain keep concealed from all human ken.

office for some weeks before he retired for a reason not stated in this volume, but one which did infinite credit to his sense of justice; that he then commanded the Engineers in the Mauritius; and that, lastly, he learnt at the Cape the fact that weak Governments, whether Chinese or colonial, have very similar methods of dealing with rebels. But these are unworthy of being remembered in connexion with Chinese Gordon. His visit to China in 1880, and the very practical advice which he gave to his old colleague, Li Hung Chang, at the time of the dispute with Russia, were more in consonance with his character and dignity. But each and all of these circumstances become in Mr. Hake's skilful hands the means of arriving at a more perfect knowledge of the character of this remarkable man. Chinese Gordon is a name to conjure with among two races to whom the blessings of pure justice and wise government have been long denied. As a general, his operations. among the creeks of Kiangsu proved him to be well able to plan out a campaign which masters in the military art admit to have been the best under the circumstances, and to bring it to a victorious conclusion. As an administrator, his work among the blacks in the Soudan must be regarded as quite the most remarkable piece of civil organisation performed by any single Englishman since the day of Warren Hastings. And, lastly, as a man, the record of his daily life, of his most trivial deeds, preserved in the hearts of those who treasure his friendship as well as in the pages of Mr. Hake's admirable biography, prove him to be one of those whose actions will serve as a beacon to others." DEMETRIUS BOULGER.

The Royal Lineage of our Noble and Gentle
Families, together with their Paternal
Ancestry. Compiled by Joseph Foster.
(Privately Printed.)

And what shall we say on the subject of his work in Egypt? Appointed in 1874 to succeed Sir Samuel Baker and to carry on the work of putting an end to the slave trade, he threw himself into his new task with all the energy that had characterised his campaign in China. His first act was significant, and showed that he did not approach the subject with ideas of self-advantage. The Khedive had fixed his salary at £10,000 a year; he refused to accept more than £2,000, the rate of pay he was then receiving as British Commissioner on the Danube. In the Soudan Gordon's vigour and capacity were conspicuous in the simplest incidents of his administration among peoples accustomed to misgovernment for generations, and practically ignorant of the meaning of such phrases as justice and mercy. His sympathy with the unfortunate and down-trodden blacks, who were made the victims of greed by their stronger neighbours, was intense. He spared neither himself nor his subordinates in endeavouring to place a term to their misery. His success, considering the very meagre support received from Cairo, was quite extraordinary. He did put an end to the slave trade for the time being, he was the means of assigning a date for the emancipation of the slaves, he overthrew the powerful robber confederacy of Zebehr and his son Suleiman, and he averted war with PEOPLE who are not genealogists will hear Abyssinia. The merit of his success was with some surprise that there are families in enhanced by the paucity of his means. Act- every rank of life who are legitimately ing in the name of a half-hearted and im-descended from the blood royal of England. pecunious Government, he was not only It is well enough known that when Mr. C. E. expected to meet the deficit of an embarrassed Long compiled his Genealogical List of Persons province, but to send sums of money to con- entitled to quarter the Royal Arms he reckoned tribute to the luxury of Cairo. The few among them a butcher, the sexton of a soldiers he could array were neither very London parish, and the toll-taker of a turnefficient nor very courageous. Their want of pike gate. But these stray instances of the courage he had frequently to supply by his vicissitudes of fortune will be less astonishing own personal intrepidity. More than once it to most people than the fact that a multitude of happened that he relieved garrisons of several well-to-do middle-class folks-solicitors, surthousand men with his own body-guard of geons, and tradesmen-can maintain pretenless than as many hundreds. On one occasion sions to royal lineage. The truth is that the he even relieved a panic-stricken garrison by descendants of the younger children of Edward himself alone! Nor was his visit to the camp I. and Edward III. were so numerous and dalmshouse in turn-more like the abode or court of the truculent King of Abyssinia prolific that the blood of the Plantagenets is a missionary than of a Colonel of Engineers. The troubles of all interested him alike. The less full of peril or less indicative of the proud now widely diffused through every class of the r, the sick, the unfortunate, were ever wel-resolve of the man to see and do everything community, and royal descent is no longer any Le, and never did suppliant knock vainly at for himself. There is no room to doubt that real test of social position. 1 door. He always took a great delight in it was the means of averting a war that could iren, but especially in boys employed on scarcely have failed to be most disastrous for river or the sea. One day a friend asked Egypt. why there were so many pins stuck into map of the world over his mantelpiece; he told that they marked and followed the ase of the boys on their voyages, that they moved from point to point as his youngsters anced, and that he prayed for them as they day by day. The light in which he was by these lads was shown by inscriptions in

Perhaps the most beautiful passage of all in the life of Chinese Gordon is that hich is the least known-his residence at Gravesend in the interval between China and Egypt. We must tell it in Mr. Hake's own vals:

His life at Gravesend was a life of self-supTression and self-denial; to himself it was one appiness and pure peace; he lived wholly others. His house was school and hospital

...

With his return in 1879 from Egypt, where he had clearly foreseen the dangers that were coming from a mutinous and unpaid soldiery, his public career may be said to have reached its latest incident of importance. It is true that he was subsequently appointed secretary to Lord Ripon, and that he held the

The first writer on this subject was Mr. Long, who published in 1845 what he intended to be an exhaustive list of all those persons who are entitled by the laws of heraldry to quarter the royal arms of England. But he attempted no pedigrees, and his list is strictly confined to heirs and co-heirs of royal cadets. This book was quickly followed by The Royal Families of England, Scotland, and Wales, in two volumes, which were the joint

production of Sir Bernard Burke and his father. They contain some 250 pedigrees of persons of royal descent, who were evidently selected on no other principle except that they were subscribers to the book. Mr. Foster's selection was probably governed by similar considerations; but, however this may be, he has produced a book of much greater interest and value. His tabular pedigrees are supplemented by a genealogical narrative, with dates and details of every generation, for the fullness and accuracy of which he deserves great praise. He gives in many cases the paternal ancestry of families, as well as their royal lineage; and he assures us in his Preface that every pedigree has been tested, and no descent has been inserted without sufficient proof. The result is that his pedigrees of Brackenbury and Woodford are shorn of several generations of unproved ancestors who were accepted without question by Sir Bernard Burke. It is a marked feature in Mr. Foster's genealogies that they show the true rank and occupation of ancestors who are usually passed off in printed pedigrees as so many Esquires, so that his readers are enabled to estimate the social position of each generation, and to trace the varying fortunes of the family as they gradually rose or fell.

may have suffered discredit through the want of scientific caution exhibited by some of its advocates, and it may require to be modified and supplemented as the field of comparative mythology is widened. But the evidence yielded by historically known mythologies cannot reasonably be set aside in favour of presumptions based on a miscellaneous study of savage myths, for the most part imperfectly reported, and at best only known to us in a single stage of their development.

Robert Hardinge married at Highgate Chapel,
on April 29, 1652, Anne Sprignell; and
their son, Gideon, the ancestor of Viscount
Hardinge, got his Christian name from his
maternal grandfather, Gideon de Laune, the
famous apothecary. Gideon Hardinge was
Vicar of Kingston-on-Thames by the presenta-
tion of his uncle Nicholas, who purchased in
1691 the manor of Canbury, to which this
vicarage is appendent. Gideon's wife, Mary
Westbrooke, was baptized at Kingston, March
4, 1669-70, and was buried there July 18, Mr. Brown does not, however, regard the
1705. She was the daughter of Caleb West-"natural phenomena theory" as supplying
brooke, Gent., from whom her son, Caleb the sole and sufficient key to the interpreta-
Hardinge, the Queen's physician, derived his tion of the Odyssey. On the contrary, he is
name. Some stress is laid on the origin of quite aware of the danger of misapplying
these names, because it has always been a this theory in the explanation of incidents
puzzle to the family how it came to pass that which can be accounted for by the poet's con-
the son and grandson of a Cavalier knight ception of geographical facts, or by the
were christened by such Puritan names as manners and customs of the Homeric age.
Gideon and Caleb.
He is even careful to note that the historical
Mr. Foster is less successful in ancient existence of Odysseus is not disproved by the
genealogy than in modern, for it seems that he arguments which resolve his recorded wander-
has still to learn the origin of the Nevills.ings into a series of nature-myths. Still, Mr.
His pedigree begins with Geoffrey de Nevill, Brown is as firmly convinced as Sir G. W.
the husband of Emma de Bulmer; whereas Cox that the true hero of most of the adven-
the founder of the family in England was tures ascribed to Odysseus is no other than
Geoffrey's grandfather, Gilbert de Nevill, who the sun, and that the superhuman personages
succeeded before 1114 to the five manors in with whom he meets are simply the actors
Lincolnshire which Ranulf de St. Valeri held in the daily presented spectacle of nature.
under the Bishop of Lincoln in Domesday. The soundness of this view must be judged
by the completeness with which it will
account for those features in the poem which
otherwise appear motiveless and arbitrary.
In several instances Mr. Brown's new applica-
tions of this principle of interpretation appear
remarkably successful.

EDMOND CHESTER WATERS.

The Myth of Kirke; including the Visit of
Odysseus to the Shades. By Robert Brown,
jun. (Longmans.)

The account of the Tennyson family will supply an interesting example. Lady Anne Leke, a co-heir of the barony of Deincourt and a lineal descendant of Edward III., married Henry Hildyard, M.P., of Winestead, a Yorkshire squire of family and fortune. Their son and heir, Henry Hildyard, turned Roman Catholic, and was compelled to sell his patrimony after the Revolution in 1688. MR. BROwn's previously published researches His son and heir, Christopher, was a profligate into the sources of Greek mythology have and a spendthrift, who deserted his wife, and shown that the divine and heroic legends of left four daughters and co-heirs slenderly pro- Hellas contain, intimately interwoven with vided for, who were glad to marry husbands the original Aryan fabric, a large proportion of a lower degree. The second daughter, of elements derived, through Phoenician and Dorothy, married in 1719 George Clayton, a other channels, from the ancient religion of Baltic merchant at Great Grimsby, by whom Babylonia. In the present volume he enshe had several children. After his death deavours to ascertain the extent to which she married again; and her second husband this foreign material is present in the stories was Ralph Tennyson, an attorney in part- narrated in the tenth and eleventh books of nership with his brother at Grimsby. Her the Odyssey, and to discover the meanings daughter, Elizabeth Clayton, married the originally underlying both the native and the younger brother of her stepfather, Michael foreign portions of these myths. Mr. Brown's Tennyson, an apothecary at Hedon-in-Holder- new volume displays the same ingenuity and ness. Their son, George Tennyson, was bred comprehensive learning as are found in its to the law, and was partner with his uncles, predecessors. Even those who reject the who both died when he was only twenty-author's interpretation of the myths must seven. He continued and extended their business, and further improved his fortunes by marrying an heiress. He acquired by purchase a considerable estate in Lincolnshire, on which he built the mansion known as Bayon's Manor. He had two sons: but his eldest son, who was Rector of Somersby, and the father of the Poet Laureate, died before him: and, when he died in 1835, he made his second son, Charles, his testamentary heir on condition of his assuming the name and arms of d'Eyncourt. Mr. Tennyson d'Eyncourt sat in ten successive Parliaments, and was sworn a member of the Privy Council. He died in 1864, and his son, Admiral d'Eyncourt, is the present owner of Bayon's Manor.

Mr. Foster has worked out the genealogy of the Hardinge family more thoroughly than it has ever hitherto been printed, but he has missed some few details which he will now be able to add in his next edition. Sir

acknowledge the value of the book as an
exhaustive summary of the facts which any
true interpretation must be able to explain.

As the readers of the ACADEMY are aware,
Mr. Brown is a decided adherent of the theory
which regards mythology as having in the
main originated in the attribution to personal
agencies of the recurrent changes of the
physical world. This theory, which was
originally based on the study of the Aryan
mythology, has received powerful support
from the phenomena of the Accado-Semitic
mythology revealed to us by the cuneiform
inscriptions. These two systems are to some
extent known to us in their historical develop-
ment, and we can trace them back to a time
when the believers in the myths were still
conscious of some sort of connexion between
mythical incidents and the phenomena of day
and night, summer and winter, cloud, wind,
and sea. The "natural phenomena theory"

Every reader of the Odyssey has been struck with the close general resemblance, along with some important differences, between the characters of Circe and Calypso. The points both of likeness and of diversity find a clear explanation in Mr. Brown's hypothesis of the nature of the two personages. He considers that Circe is strictly the moongoddess, of Babylonian origin, though with an Aryan name (meaning, according to Mr. Brown, the "Round" moon), while Calypso is a more purely Aryan conception, representing the night sky with moon and stars. Mr. Brown points out that the relations between the Babylonian lunar goddess Istar and the solar hero "Izdubar" closely resemble those between Circe and Odysseus; and in the legend of the "Descent of Istar" he finds a parallel to Circe's acquaintance with the under-world. A strong case is thus made out not only for the naturalistic interpretation of the myth, but for its derivation from a foreig source. In support of the latter conclusion Mr. Brown adduces, among many other argu ments, the correspondence between the pecu liar orientation of the Babylonian temples an the distortion of the points of the compas observable in the Homeric geography. A other indication of Babylonian influence found in the southward voyage of Odysseus t wards Erebus, which Mr. Brown compares wit the Accadian belief that the spirits of the dea sailed down the Euphrates to their final hom I cannot share Mr. Brown's confidence in h Accadian derivations of certain Homeric prope

names.

Coincidence of sound, unsupporte by historical evidence, is a very unsafe guid in etymology. The suggestion of a (moor as the etymon of the name of Circe's islan