"The time will come that Totnam French shall turn."
And in the tenth Book we hear of "The Bastile": "Lemster wool," and
"The Byble."
[11] The relaxations of "England's queen" with her maids of honour were not, if we may credit the existing memoirs of her court, precisely such as modern fastidiousness would assign to the "fair vestal throned by the west."
[12] A very full and satisfactory essay on the learning of Shakespeare, may be found in Mr. Malone's Edition of Shakespeare, i. 300.
[13]
[Greek: Memonomenos d' o tlaemon
Aealin aethelon katheudein.] Anac. 8.
[14] The Comedy of Errors, which has been partly taken by some wretched playwright from the Menaechmi of Plautus, is intolerably stupid: that it may occasionally display the touch of Shakespeare, cannot be denied; but these purpurei panni are lamentably infrequent; and, to adopt the language of Mr. Stevens, "that the entire play was no work of his, is an opinion which (as Benedick says) fire cannot melt out of me; I will die in it at the stake." Dr. Drake's Literary Life of Johnson.—Ed.
[15] A list of these translations may be seen in Malone's Shakespeare, i. 371. It was originally drawn up by Mr. Steevens.—Ed.
[16] See Dryden in the Epistle Dedicatory to his Rival Ladies.—Ed.
[17] It appears, from the induction of Ben Jonson's "Bartholomew Fair," to have been acted before the year 1590.—STEEVENS.
[18] The errors of the promoter's books of the present day excite the violent invective of Mr. Steevens, in his notes on Johnson's Preface.—Ed.