appears.  After all, the question occurs:  What has become of the bodies said to have been preserved?  As all parties concur in naming “old Mr. Staniforth” as the accoucheur in attendance on Mrs. Birch; and as that gentleman has been dead many years, I called upon his eldest surviving pupil, Mr. Nicholson, surgeon, to ask him whether, in conversation, or among the preparations in the surgery of his worthy master, he had ever met with any illustration of the parturition in question?  He replied that he had not.  It may not, perhaps, be out of place here to mention that the above-named Mr. Nicholson, surgeon, himself delivered a poor woman of five children, on the 10th of February, 1829, at Handsworth Woodhouse, near Sheffield.  This case was even more remarkable than that which gave occasion to the paper which was read before the Royal Society in 1787, inasmuch as not only were four of the children born alive, but three of them lived to be baptized.

N.D.

Sheffield, Jan. 13. 1851.

* * * * *

SHAKSPEARE’S USE OF “CAPTIOUS.”

(Vol. ii., p. 354.)

In All’s Well that Ends Well, Act I. Sc. 3., Helena says to the Countess, speaking of her love for Bertram,—­

  “I know I love in vain; strive against hope;
  Yet, in this captious and intenible sieve,
  I still pour in the waters of my love,
  And lack not to lose still.”

It is not without hesitation that I venture to oppose MR. SINGER on a point on which he is so well entitled to give an opinion.  But I cannot help thinking that MR. SINGER’S explanation, besides being somewhat too refined and recondite, is less applicable to the general sense and drift of the passage than that of Steevens, which Malone and Mr. Collier have adopted.

What I think wanting to Steevens’ interpretation, is an increase, if I may so express myself, of intensity.  He takes the word, I conceive, in its right bearing, but does not give it all the requisite force.  I should suggest that it means not merely “recipient, capable of receiving,” but, to coin a word, captatious, eager or greedy to receive, absorbing; as we say avidum mare, or a greedy gulf.  The Latin analogous to it in this sense would be, not capax, or MR. SINGER’S captiosus, but captax, or captabundus; neither of which words, however, occurs.

The sense of the word, like that of many others in the same author, must be determined by the scope and object of the passage in which it is used.  The object of Helena, in declaring her love to the Countess, is to show the all-absorbing nature of it; to prove that she is tota in illo; and that, however she may strive to stop the cravings of it, her endeavours are of no more use than the attempt to fill up a bottomless abyss.

The reader may, if he pleases, compare her case with that of other heroines in like predicaments.  Thus Medaea, in Apollonius Rhodius: