from the commonwealth of letters. Even Shakspere and Milton were little more than names. To the patched and periwigged taste of Queen Anne’s and the Georgian era they made no appeal; the critics of the quadrille-table and the tea-gardens, the “pretty fellows” of the Wells, voted them low and insipid. Milton was a wild fanatic with heterodox notions of regicide, who wrote a dull epic which the ingenious Mr. Addison saw fit to praise in his Spectator for a novelty, of course, though his papers upon it were certainly far less amusing than those devoted to Sir Roger and his widow or the diversions of the Amorous Club; while Shakspere was a curious old playwright whom the great Mr. Pope stooped to admire with qualifications, and even to edit—with notes, and some of whose rude productions, notably King Lear, when polished and made presentable by the elegant Mr. Tate, were really not so bad, though of course not for a moment to be compared to such superlative flights of genius as The Distressed Mother or The Mourning Bride. Does anybody nowadays read the elegant Mr. Tate, King William’s laureate of pious and immortal memory? Besides his labors in civilizing King Lear and his celebrated Poems upon Tea, perhaps also upon toast, a grateful country owed to him, in conjunction with Dr. Brady, its rescue from Sternhold and Hopkins, “arch-botchers of a psalm or prayer,” of whom we read, with a subdued but mighty joy, that they
“… had great qualms
When they translated David’s Psalms,”
as well they might. Yet, despite this notable achievement, Nahum (Nahum, O Phœbus! was his name) has long since ceased to fill the
speaking trump. But for his impertinences to the “poor despised” Lear he would be quite forgotten. He is a fly like many another preserved in Shakspere’s amber.
One reads with a sort of dumb rage of these essays of smirking mediocrity to “improve on” that colossal genius. It was Gulliver tricked out by the Liliputians. Tate was not the only ‘prentice hand that tried its skill at “painting the lily.” Cibber and Shadwell were industrious at it, and to this day many of us know Shakspere’s “refined gold” only as it comes to us electroplated from the Cibberian crucible. Lord Lansdowne prepared a Jew of Venice, which was acted with a prologue by Mr. Bevill Higgins—another Phœbean title which the great trumpeter has unaccountably dropped. Mr. Higgins brings forward Shakspere telling Dryden:
“These scenes in their rough native dress weremine,
But now, improved, with nobler lustre shine;
The first rude sketches Shakspere’s pencil drew,
But all the shining master-strokes are new.