unless—­which appears to me not unreasonable—­we assume that the printer of that edition lied or blundered after the manner of his contemporary kind in attributing on the title-page—­as apparently he meant to attribute—­any share in the additional scenes or speeches to the original author of the play.  In any case, the passages thus added to that grimmest and most sombre of tragicomedies are in such exact keeping with the previous text that the keenest scent of the veriest blood-hound among critics could not detect a shade of difference in the savor.

The text of either comedy is generally very fair—­as free from corruption as could reasonably be expected.  The text of “Sir Thomas Wyatt” is corrupt as well as mutilated.  Even in Mr. Dyce’s second edition I have noted, not without astonishment, the following flagrant errors left still to glare on us from the distorted and disfigured page.  In the sixth scene a single speech of Arundel’s contains two of the most palpably preposterous: 

   The obligation wherein we all stood bound
       * * * * *
   Cannot be concealed without great reproach
   To us and to our issue.

We should of course read “cancelled” for “concealed”:  the sense of the context and the exigence of the verse cry alike aloud for the correction.  In the sixteenth line from this we come upon an equally 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