mposer, Dr. John Bull, who he believes composed it for the
entertainment given by the Merchant Taylors Company to King
James I., in 1607. Ward, in his "Lives of the Gresham
Professors," gives a list of Bull's compositions, then in the
possession of Dr. Pepusch (who arranged the music for the
_Beggar's Opera_), and Art. 56 is "God save the King." At the
Doctor's death, his manuscripts, amounting to two cartloads,
were scattered or sold for waste-paper, and this was one of
the number. Clark ultimately recovered this MS.--ED.

THE MISERIES OF THE FIRST ENGLISH COMMENTATOR.

DR. ZACHARY GREY, the editor of "Hudibras," is the father of our
modern commentators.[74] His case is rather peculiar; I know not
whether the father, by an odd anticipation, was doomed to suffer
for the sins of his children, or whether his own have been visited
on the third generation; it is certain that never was an author
more overpowered by the attacks he received from the light and
indiscriminating shafts of ignorant wits. He was ridiculed and abused
for having assisted us to comprehend the wit of an author, which,
without that aid, at this day would have been nearly lost to us; and
whose singular subject involved persons and events which required the
very thing he gave,--historical and explanatory notes.

A first thought, and all the danger of an original invention, which is
always imperfectly understood by the superficial, was poor Dr. Grey's
merit. He was modest and laborious, and he had the sagacity to
discover what Butler wanted, and what the public required. His project
was a happy thought, to commentate on a singular work which has
scarcely a parallel in modern literature, if we except the "Satyre
Menippee" of the French, which is, in prose, the exact counterpart of
"Hudibras" in rhyme; for our rivals have had the same state
revolution, in which the same dramatic personages passed over their
national stage, with the same incidents, in the civil wars of the
ambitious Guises, and the citizen-reformers. They, too, found a
Butler, though in prose, a Grey in Duchat, and, as well as they could,
a Hogarth. An edition, which appeared in 1711, might have served as
the model of Grey's Hudibras.

It was, however, a happy thought in our commentator, to turn over the
contemporary writers to collect the events and discover the personages
alluded to by Butler; to read what the poet