[72a] In Rowe’s Tamerlane. See ‘Macready’s Reminiscences,’ i. 202.
[72b] Probably the English Tragedy, which was finished in October 1838. See ‘Records of Later Days,’ ii. 168.
[74] In the Transactions of the New Shakspere Society for 1875-76. The surviving editor of the ‘Cambridge Shakspeare’ does not at all feel that Spedding’s criticism ‘smashed’ the theory which was only put forward as a tentative solution of a perhaps insoluble problem.
[75a] See ‘Letters,’ ii. 177.
[75b] See ‘Letters,’ ii. 198, 228, and Boswell’s ‘Johnson’ (ed. Birkbeck Hill), iv. 193.
[77] FitzGerald wrote to me about the same time:
“Spedding has (you know) a delicious little Paper about the Merchant of Venice in July Fraser:—but I think he is wrong in subordinating Shylock to the Comedy Part. If that were meant to be so, Williams [‘the divine Williams,’ as some Frenchman called Shakespeare] miscalculated, throwing so much of his very finest writing into the Jew’s Mouth, the downright human Nature of which makes all the Love-Story Child’s play, though very beautiful Child’s play indeed.”
[78] ‘On the Stage,’ in the Cornhill Magazine for December 1863 Reprinted as an Introduction to Mrs. Kemble’s ‘Notes upon some of Shakespeare’s Plays.’
[79] See his ‘Life and Letters,’ p. 46.
[80] In the Cornhill Magazine for July 1875, The Merchant of Venice at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre.