Preceptes of Cato, with Annotations of Erasmus, &c. 24m0. London 1560 and 1562 Ames mentions a Discourse of Human Nature, translated from Hippocrates, p. 428; an Extract from Pliny, translated from the French, p. 312; Esop*, &c. by Caxton and others; and there is no doubt, but many Translations, at present unknown, may be gradually recovered, either by Industry or Accident. * " Æsop's Fables in Englishe" were entered May 7th, 1590, on the books of the Stationers-Company. Again, Oct. 1591. Again, Esop's Fables in Meter, Nov. 1598. Some few of them had been paraphrased by Lydgate, and I believe are still unpublished. See the Brit. Mus. MSS. Harl. 2251. It is much to be lamented that Andrew Maunsell, a bookseller in Lothbury, who published two parts of a catalogue of English printed books, fol. 1595, did not proceed to his third collection. This, according to his own account of it, would have consisted of "Grammar, Logick, and Rhetoricke, Lawe, Historie, Poetrie, Policie, &c." which, as he tells us, " for the most part concerne matters of delight and pleasure." STEEVENS. APPENDIX THE reverend and ingenious Mr. Farmer, in his curious and entertaining Essay on the Learning of Shakspere, having done me the honour to animadvert on some passages in the preface to this translation, I cannot dismiss this edition without declaring how far I coincide with that gentleman; although what I then threw out carelessly on the subject of his pamphlet was merely incidental, nor did I mean to enter the lists as a champion to defend either side of the question. It is most true, as Mr. Farmer takes for granted, that I had never met with the old comedy called The Supposes, nor has it ever yet fallen into my hands; yet I am willing to grant, on Mr. Farmer's authority, that Shakspere borrowed part of the plot of The Taming of the Shrew, from that old translation of Ariosto's Ariosto's play, by George Gascoign, and had no obligations to Plautus. I will accede also to the truth of Dr. Johnson's and Mr. Farmer's observation, that the line from Terence, exactly as it stands in Shakspere, is extant in Lilly and Udall's Floures for Latin Speaking. Still, however, Shakspere's total ignorance of the learned languages remains to be proved; for it must be granted, that such books are put into the hands of those who are learning those languages, in which class we must necessarily rank Shakspere, or he could not even have quoted Terence from Udall or Lilly; nor is it likely, that so rapid a genius should not have made some further progress. "Our "author (says Dr. Johnson, as quoted by Mr. Far"mer) had this line from Lilly; which I mention, " that it may not be brought as an argument of his "learning." It is, however, an argument that he read Lilly; and a few pages further it seems pretty certain, that the author of The Taming of the Shrew had at least read Ovid; from whose Epistle we find these lines. Hac ibat Simois; hic est Sigeia tellus; And what does Dr. Johnson say on this occasion? Nothing. And what does Mr. Farmer say on this occasion? Nothing. In Love's Labour Lost, which, bad as it is, is ascribed by Dr. Johnson himself to Shakspere, there occurs the word thrasonical; another argument which seems to shew that he was not unacquainted with the comedies of Terence; not to mention, that the character of the School-Master in the same play could not possibly be written by a man who had travelled no further in Latin than hic, hæc, hoc. arcurs In Henry the Sixth we meet with a quotation from Virgil, Tantæne animis cœlestibus iræ ? But this, it seems, proves nothing, any more than the lines from Terence and Ovid, in the Taming of the Shrew; for Mr. Farmer looks on Shakspere's property in the comedy to be extremely disputable; and he has no doubt but Henry the Sixth had the same author with Edward the Third, which had been recovered to the world in Mr. Capell's Prolusions. If any play in the collection bears internal evidence of Shakspere's hand, we may fairly give him Timon of Athens. In this play we have a similar quotation from Horace. Ira furor brevis est. I will not maintain but this hemistich may be found in Lilly or Udall; or that it is not in the Palace of Pleasure, or the English Plutarch; or that it was not originally foisted in by the players: it stands, however, in the play of Timon of Athens. The The world in general, and those who purpose to comment on Shakspere in particular, will owe much to Mr. Farmer, whose researches into our old authors throw a lustre on many passages, the obscurity of which must else have been impenetrable. No future Upton or Gildon will go further than North's translation for Shakspere's acquaintance with Plutarch, or balance between Dare's Phrygius, and the Troy booke of Lydgate. The historie of Hamblet, in black letter, will for ever supersede Saxo-Grammaticus; translated novels and ballads will, perhaps, be allowed the sources of Romeo, Lear, and the Merchant of Venice; and Shakspere himself, however unlike Bayes in other particulars, will stand convicted of having transversed the prose of Holingshed; and, at the same time, to prove " that his studies lay in his own language," the translations of Ovid are determined to be the production of Heywood. "That his studies were most demonstratively con"fined to nature, and his own language," I readily allow; but does it hence follow that he was so deplo. rably ignorant of every other tongue, living or dead, that he only " remembered, perhaps, enough of his " school-boy learning to put the hig, hag, hog, into the " mouth of Sir H. Evans; and might pick up in the "writers of the time, or the course of his conversa" tion, a familiar phrase or two of French or Italian ?" In Shakspere's plays both these last languages are plentifully scattered; but then, we are told, they might be impertinent additions of the players Undoubtedly Pp |