M.H.

FLOWERS VS.  FLIES.

An Irish clergyman is said to have discovered last autumn a charming antidote to flies, which it is only a pity he could not have lighted on rather earlier in the season.  Having occasion to change his abode, he sent on his window-plants, calceolarias and geraniums, to that which he intended to occupy several days before he went himself, and immediately found that he was pestered with flies, whereas previously he had enjoyed perfect immunity from the nuisance.  A more agreeable remedy cannot be conceived.  Next autumn let our windows be a blaze of brilliancy, so that all visitors to the Centennial may say, at all events, “There are no flies in Philadelphia.”

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Shakespeare Hermeneutics; or, The Still Lion.  Being an Essay towards the Restoration of Shakespeare’s Text.  By C.M.  Ingleby, M.A., LL.D.  London:  Truebner & Co.

Setting aside those who care merely to see a play on the stage, it may be said that of Shakespeare there are readers and readers; and both classes have rights and privileges which should be treated with deference.  The reader who studies every line should not fleer at him who studies not at all.  Have we not a right to read a play of Shakespeare’s through in two short hours, surrendering ourselves, unvexed by logic or grammar, to the enchantment which scenes and phrases and words conjure up as they glide through our minds?  When all the atmosphere is tremulous with airs from heaven or blasts from hell, must we, forsooth! stop and philosophically investigate what Hamlet means by a “dram of eale"?  Must we lose a scruple of the sport by turning aside to find out what Malvolio means by the “lady of the Strachey”?  If Timon chooses to invite Ullorxa to his feast, are we to bar the door because no one ever heard the name before?  No:  let us have our Shakespeare (is he not as much ours as yours?) free from all notes, on a page purified from the musty cobwebs of black-letter pedants.  We want no jargon of bickering critics to drown the music that sings at Heaven’s gate.  Give us those immortal plays just as Shakespeare wrote them, that we may read them without let or hinderance.

But, fair and softly, is not this the very point at which we are striving?  With all our twistings and turnings, our patchings and piecings, have we aught else in view than to decipher just what Shakespeare wrote?  Where are Shakespeare’s exact words to be found?  Not in the so-called Quartos; for they are said by Shakespeare’s intimate and dear friends to have been “maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors,” and taken down perhaps from the lips of some of the actors, bribed by stoops of liquor at Yaughan’s (and from the gibberish here and there set down it is to be feared that the potations were at times pottle