Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare | Page 2

Petrarca," to have taken his idea of Sir Magnus from this

manuscript. He, however, has adapted that character to the times; and
in Sir Magnus the coward rises to the courageous, the unskilful in arms
becomes the skilful, and war is to him a teacher of humanity. With
much superstition, theology never molests him; scholarship and poetry
are no affairs of his. He doubts of himself and others, and is as
suspicious in his ignorance as Sir Thomas is confident.
With these wide diversities, there are family features, such as are likely
to display themselves in different times and circumstances, and some
so generically prevalent as never to lie quite dormant in the breed. In
both of them there is parsimony, there is arrogance, there is contempt
of inferiors, there is abject awe of power, there is irresolution, there is
imbecility. But Sir Magnus has no knowledge, and no respect for it. Sir
Thomas would almost go thirty miles, even to Oxford, to see a fine
specimen of it, although, like most of those who call themselves the
godly, he entertains the most undoubting belief that he is competent to
correct the errors of the wisest and most practised theologian.

EDITOR'S APOLOGY.

A part only of the many deficiencies which the reader will discover in
this book is attributable to the Editor. These, however, it is his duty to
account for, and he will do it as briefly as he can.
The fac-similes (as printers' boys call them, meaning specimens) of the
handwriting of nearly all the persons introduced, might perhaps have
been procured had sufficient time been allowed for another journey into
Warwickshire. That of Shakspeare is known already in the signature to
his will, but deformed by sickness; that of Sir Thomas Lucy is extant at
the bottom of a commitment of a female vagrant, for having a sucking
child in her arms on the public road; that of Silas Gough is affixed to
the register of births and marriages, during several years, in the parishes
of Hampton Lucy and Charlecote, and certifies one death,--Euseby
Treen's; surmised, at least, to be his by the letters "E. T." cut on a bench
seven inches thick, under an old pollard-oak outside the park paling of
Charlecote, toward the northeast. For this discovery the Editor is
indebted to a most respectable, intelligent farmer in the adjoining
parish of Wasperton, in which parish Treen's elder brother lies buried.
The worthy farmer is unwilling to accept the large portion of fame

justly due to him for the services he has thus rendered to literature in
elucidating the history of Shakspeare and his times. In possession of
another agricultural gentleman there was recently a very curious piece
of iron, believed by many celebrated antiquaries to have constituted a
part of a knight's breast-plate. It was purchased for two hundred pounds
by the trustees of the British Museum, among whom, the reader will be
grieved to hear, it produced dissension and coldness; several of them
being of opinion that it was merely a gorget, while others were inclined
to the belief that it was the forepart of a horse-shoe. The Committee of
Taste and the Heads of the Archaeological Society were consulted.
These learned, dispassionate, and benevolent men had the satisfaction
of conciliating the parties at variance,--each having yielded somewhat
and every member signing, and affixing his seal to the signature, that, if
indeed it be the forepart of a horse-shoe, it was probably
Ismael's,--there being a curved indentation along it, resembling the first
letter of his name, and there being no certainty or record that he died in
France, or was left in that country by Sir Magnus.
The Editor is unable to render adequate thanks to the Rev. Stephen
Turnover for the gratification he received in his curious library by a
sight of Joseph Carnaby's name at full length, in red ink, coming from a
trumpet in the mouth of an angel. This invaluable document is upon an
engraving in a frontispiece to the New Testament. But since unhappily
he could procure no signature of Hannah Hathaway, nor of her mother,
and only a questionable one of Mr. John Shakspeare, the poet's
father,--there being two, in two very different hands,--both he and the
publisher were of opinion that the graphical part of the volume would
be justly censured as extremely incomplete, and that what we could
give would only raise inextinguishable regret for that which we could
not. On this reflection all have been omitted.
The Editor is unwilling to affix any mark of disapprobation on the very
clever engraver who undertook the sorrel mare; but as in the
memorable words of that ingenious gentleman from Ireland whose
polished and elaborate epigrams raised him justly to the rank of prime
minister, -
"White