Ri. Come, we loose tyme.
Fra. Preserve your marriage faith: a full increase Of what you wish confirme your happinesse.
[Exeunt.
FINIS.
APPENDIX I.
The folio volume numbered Eg. MS. 1,994 contains 349 leaves. It was purchased by the British Museum, for the very modest sum of thirty-three pounds, at the sale of Lord Charlemont's library on August 6, 1865. Mr. Warner (of the Manuscript Department of the British Museum), to whom the public are indebted for an excellent catalogue of the Dulwich Collection, thinks that the volume originally belonged to Dulwich College. Towards the end of the XVIIth century Cartwright, the actor, bequeathed to the College a number of MS. plays, which the College authorities in the middle of the last century exchanged (horrendum dictu!) for tomes of controversial divinity. Of all the plays left by the actor only one[280]—and that imperfect—remains. The late Lord Charlemont was a friend of Malone, and it is well known that Malone had many of the Dulwich documents in his possession for years. Mr. Warner's theory is that Malone lent the volume to Lord Charlemont, and that it was never returned. The objection that naturally suggests itself is, "How came so acute a scholar as Malone to fail to draw attention to a Collection of such considerable interest?" And I confess that I am not able to offer any satisfactory answer.
The volume contains in all fifteen plays, written in various hands. One piece has the author's initials attached, but the others have neither name nor initials.
First in order, leaves 1-29, stands Fletcher's Elder Brother. I have compared the MS. with Dyce's text, and find the variations to be few and unimportant. In III. 3 Dyce follows the old copies in reading:—
What a noise is in this house! my head is broken
Within a parenthesis: in every corner,
As if the earth were shaken with some strange colic,
There are stirs and motions.
As the words "within a parenthesis" were found in all the old copies Dyce did not feel justified in rejecting them, although he had only the most grotesque meaning to assign to them. Theobald rightly saw that "within a parenthesis" was a marginal note, mistaken for a part of the text when the book was sent to press. The MS. gives—