What You Will.—­O I shall ne’er forget how he went cloath’d.  Act 1.  Scene 1.—­To judge of the liberality of these notions of dress, we must advert to the days of Gresham, and the consternation which a phenomenon habited like the merchant here described would have excited among the flat round caps, and cloth stockings upon ’Change, when those “original arguments or tokens of a citizen’s vocation were in fashion, not more for thrift and usefulness than for distinction and grace.”  The blank uniformity to which all professional distinctions in apparel have been long hastening is one instance of the decay of symbols among us, which, whether it has contributed or not to make us a more intellectual, has certainly made us a less imaginative people.  Shakespeare knew the force of signs:  a “malignant and turbaned Turk.”  This “meal-cap miller,” says the author of God’s Revenge against Murder, to express his indignation at an atrocious outrage committed by the miller Pierot upon the person of the fair Marieta.

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AUTHOR UNKNOWN.

The Merry Devil of Edmonton.—­The scene in this delightful comedy, in which Jerningham, “with the true feeling of a zealous friend,” touches the griefs of Mounchensey, seems written to make the reader happy.  Few of our dramatists or novelists have attended enough to this.  They torture and wound us abundantly.  They are economists only in delight.  Nothing can be finer, more gentlemanlike, and nobler, than the conversation and compliments of these young men.  How delicious is Raymond Mounchensey’s forgetting, in his fears, that Jerningham has a “Saint in Essex;” and how sweetly his friend reminds him!  I wish it could be ascertained, which there is some grounds for believing, that Michael Drayton was the author of this piece.  It would add a worthy appendage to the renown of that Panegyrist of my native Earth; who has gone over her soil, in his Polyolbion, with the fidelity of a herald, and the painful love of a son; who has not left a rivulet, so narrow that it may be stepped over, without honorable mention; and has animated hills and streams with life and passion beyond the dreams of old mythology.

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THOMAS HEYWOOD.

A Woman Killed with Kindness.—­Heywood is a sort of prose Shakspeare.  His scenes are to the full as natural and affecting.  But we miss the poet, that which in Shakspeare always appears out and above the surface of the nature.  Heywood’s characters, in this play, for instance, his country gentlemen, &c., are exactly what we see, but of the best kind of what we see in life.  Shakspeare makes us believe, while we are among his lovely creations, that they are nothing but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things seem old; but we awake, and sigh for the difference.