Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Age of Shakespeare by Algernon Charles Swinburne
page 18 of 245 (07%)
obvious error:

Advice in this I hold it better far,
To keep the course we run, than, seeking change,
Hazard our lives, our honors, and the realm.

It seems hardly credible to those who are aware how much they owe to the
excellent scholarship and editorial faculty of Mr. Dyce, that he should
have allowed such a misprint as "heirs" for "honors" to stand in this
last unlucky line. Again, in the next scene, when the popular leader
Captain Brett attempts to reassure the country folk who are startled at
the sight of his insurgent array, he is made to utter (in reply to the
exclamation, "What's here? soldiers!") the perfectly fatuous phrase,
"Fear not good speech." Of course--once more--we should read, "Fear not,
good people"; a correction which rectifies the metre as well as the
sense.

The play attributed to Webster and Rowley by a publisher of the next
generation has been carefully and delicately analyzed by a critic of our
own time, who naturally finds it easy to distinguish the finer from the
homelier part of the compound weft, and to assign what is rough and
crude to the inferior, what is interesting and graceful to the superior
poet. The authority of the rogue Kirkman may be likened to the outline
or profile of Mr. Mantalini's early loves: it is either no authority at
all, or at best it is a "demd" authority. The same swindler who assigned
to Webster and Rowley the authorship of "A Cure for a Cuckold" assigned
to Shakespeare and Rowley the authorship of an infinitely inferior
play--a play of which German sagacity has discovered that "none of
Rowley's other works are equal to this." Assuredly they are not--in
utter stolidity of platitude and absolute impotence of drivel. Rowley
DigitalOcean Referral Badge