pronounce them natural or unnatural; but he seems to
have worked in the very stuff of which memory and experience are made,
and we recognize his truth to Nature by an innate and unacquired
sympathy, as if he alone possessed the secret of the "ideal form and
universal mould," and embodied generic types rather than individuals.
In this Cervantes alone has approached him; and Don Quixote and Sancho,
like the men and women of Shakspeare, are the contemporaries of
every generation, because they are not products of an artificial and
transitory society, but because they are animated by the primeval and
unchanging forces of that humanity which underlies and survives the
forever-fickle creeds and ceremonials of the parochial corners which we
who dwell in them sublimely call The World.

But the dropping of our _variorum_ volume upon the floor recalls us
from our reverie, and, as we pick it up, we ask ourselves sadly, Is it
fitting that we should have a Shakspeare according to plodding Malone
or coarse-minded Steevens, both of whom would have had the headache all
their lives after, could one of the Warwickshire plebeian's conceptions
have got into their brains and stretched them, and who would have hidden
under their bedclothes in a cold-sweat of terror, could they have
seen the awful vision of Macbeth as he saw it? No! and to every other
commentator who has wantonly tampered with the text, or obscured it
with his inky cloud of paraphrase, we feel inclined to apply the
quadrisyllable name of the brother of Agis, king of Sparta. Clearly, we
should be grateful to an editor who feels it his chief duty to scrape
away these barnacles from the brave old hull, to replace with the
original heart-of-oak the planks where these small but patient
terebrators have bored away the tough fibre to fill the gap with
sawdust!

This task Mr. White has undertaken, and, after such conscientious
examination of his work as the importance of it demands, after a painful
comparison, note by note, and reading by reading, of his edition with
those of Messrs. Knight, Collier, and Dyce, our opinion of his ability
and fitness for his task has been heightened and confirmed. Not that we
always agree with him,--not that we do not think that in respect of the
Folio text he has sometimes erred on the side of superstitious reverence
for it, and sometimes in too rashly abandoning it,--but, making all
due exceptions, we think that his edition is, in the phrase of our N