m Holingshed, and you
will find at once that Shakespeare had been there before me:--"Ye see
further, how a companie of traitors, theeves, outlaws, and runnagates be
aiders and partakers of his feat and enterprise.--And to begin with the
erle of Richmond, captaine of this rebellion, he is a Welsh
milksop--brought up by _my Moother's_ meanes and mine, like a captive in a
close cage, in the court of Francis duke of _Britaine_." p. 756.

Holingshed copies this _verbatim_ from his brother chronicler Hall, Edit.
1548, fol. 54; but his Printer hath given us by accident the word
_Moother_ instead of _Brother_; as it is in the Original, and ought to be
in Shakespeare.

I hope, my good Friend, you have by this time acquitted our great Poet of
all piratical depredations on the Ancients, and are ready to receive my
_Conclusion_.--He remembered perhaps enough of his _school-boy_ learning to
put the _Hig_, _hag_, _hog_, into the mouth of Sir Hugh Evans; and might
pick up in the Writers of the time, or the course of his conversation, a
familiar phrase or two of French or Italian: but his _Studies_ were most
demonstratively confined to _Nature_ and _his own Language_.

In the course of this disquisition, you have often smiled at "all such
reading as was never read": and possibly I may have indulged it too far:
but it is the reading necessary for a Comment on Shakespeare. Those who
apply solely to the Ancients for this purpose, may with equal wisdom study
the TALMUD for an Exposition of TRISTRAM SHANDY. Nothing but an intimate
acquaintance with the Writers of the time, who are frequently of no other
value, can point out his allusions, and ascertain his Phraseology. The
Reformers of his Text are for ever equally positive, and equally wrong.
The Cant of the Age, a provincial Expression, an obscure Proverb, an
obsolete Custom, a Hint at a Person or a Fact no longer remembered, hath
continually defeated the best of our _Guessers_: You must not suppose me
to speak at random, when I assure you that, from some forgotten book or
other, I can demonstrate this to you in many hundred Places; and I almost
wish that I had not been persuaded into a different Employment.

Tho' I have as much of the _Natale Solum_ about me as any man whatsoever;
yet, I own, the _Primrose Path_ is still more pleasing than the _Fosse_ or
the _Watling Street_:

Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale
It's infinite variety.----

And when I am fairly rid of