was then uttering a conscious falsehood. It happens that Lear was
one of the few Shakspearian dramas which had kept the stage
unaltered. But it is easy to see a mercenary motive in such an
artifice as this. Mr. Nahum Tate is not of a class of whom it can
be safe to say that they are "well known:" they and their desperate
tricks are essentially obscure, and good reason he has to exult in
the felicity of such obscurity; for else this same vilest of
travesties, Mr. Nahum's Lear, would consecrate his name to
everlasting scorn. For himself, he belonged to the age of Dryden
rather than of Pope: he "flourished," if we can use such a phrase
of one who was always withering, about the era of the Revolution;
and his Lear, we believe, was arranged in the year 1682. But the
family to which he belongs is abundantly recorded in the Dunciad,
and his own name will be found amongst its catalogues of heroes.

With respect to _the author of the Tatler_, a very different
explanation is requisite. Steevens means the reader to understand
Addison; but it does not follow that the particular paper in
question was from his pen. Nothing, however, could be more natural
than to quote from the common form of the play as then in
possession of the stage. It was _there_, beyond a doubt, that
a fine gentleman living upon town, and not professing any deep
scholastic knowledge of literature, (a light in which we are always
to regard the writers of the Spectator, Guardian, &c.,) would be
likely to have learned anything he quoted from Macbeth. This we say
generally of the writers in those periodical papers; but, with
reference to Addison in particular, it is time to correct the
popular notion of his literary character, or at least to mark it by
severer lines of distinction. It is already pretty well known, that
Addison had no very intimate acquaintance with the literature of