of that indifferent dog couchant upon the mat. The figures are not so eloquent as the furniture. These chairs and tables were arranged for an ordered ceremonious family life with which we are unfamiliar. These ornaments, painted with such precision, are not the produce of bazaars, but the heirlooms and the evidence of transmitted taste. That curtain bellying with the wind fixes the moment. Here Is the breath of life, and we can add to our years a past into which we can enter with satisfaction. To realize detail in true perspective and proportion is to know the secret of appropriate living.

Returning to the old building, what is it that fascinates us? We do not wish to see it again as it was when the masons left it. We welcome the lichen and the ivy, we love the crumbling mullion, we regret not the broken string-course-why? because they recall the past? No, but because they tell us of the flow of time and humanize for us the mocking permanence of stone. Architecture, in fact, is less interesting because buildings are, or were, built to last. There is a stubborn fixity about them while all things change. They intrude so obviously on the present, and belong so incongruously to the past. Over the gulf between past and present is the bridge of ruin and decay. The sentimental may revel in it beneath the moon; but those who believe in life's purpose, and have a pulse for actuality, would learn from the past a healthier and more inspiring lesson. Past and present are fused together in a furnished room, and harmonize in a mind conscious of its be ing and retentive of what has been. History is writ more graciously in wood than stone. Wood takes more forms, is more adaptable, condescends to all classes, is less austere, more comfortable and takes an easier polish.

Furniture can be altered, added to,

and variously disposed. Furniture gains in polish and coloring as it advances in age. It endures but it does not decay. When it is broken it is apotheosized in fire. Furniture also can be moved, and in these days of mobility and mutability man cannot carry his house, like a snail, upon his back. But if like Stevenson he is compelled to seek some far-away Vailima, he can carry with him the old chairs, he can gaze at the old pictures, and drink out of the same "crystal" as he did at home.

On the other hand we can only study architecture by years of travel. We can never live in the contemplation of much that we admire. But the student of furniture can collect about him movables of every date and every clime, and make his home an exposi tion of his tastes. Quizzical Horace Walpole could pick up the gauntlet of Francis the chivalrous on his staircase and exchange a nod with the bust of Vespasian in his gallery; he could entertain the Gunnings with china gods, and with goddesses in porcelain; and then retire to his cabinet, "formed upon the idea of a Catholic chapel" (save the mark!) and write The Castle of Otranto. You jeer at the old col lector. He, at any rate you say, was not philosophic; he knew nothing of inculcating a creed by symbols or teaching morality by metaphors. Horace Walpole, my superior friend, could afford to laugh at himself and at the trinkets he honestly paid for; when you are sufficiently philosophic to pay for what you laugh at, you may collect postage stamps or accumulate "tickets of leave."

III.

Furniture, then, need not fear to rival architecture in interest, and I believe that students of furniture can af ford to despise the philosophy of clothes. I do not mean that any one

may despise the philosophy of clothes. Carlyle has opened the seams of sartorial patchwork and drawn out the thread of transcendental mystery with exclamations and ululations and not a little crowing. Had he only turned his attention to furniture the fashion of his philosophic cloak would not have embarrassed him, while the puckers and creases of his humor might not have irritated his readers. Anyhow he would have realized that a man's activity depends more on the comfort of his chair than on the cut of his breeches.

Still, clothes are important, they touch us so closely, fetter the freedom of our movements, enhance our comeliness and cover our uncomely parts. We are hardly ever free of them, modesty requires them, cold necessitates them, rank is expressed by them, character indicated; they fit or misfit us like the circumstances of our life. But is not furniture quite as significant? Sherlock Holmes may detect a policeman by his boots, but many a man has been betrayed by a padded armchair. Seneca tells us in his works what he wished to be; his sumptuous "insula," that excited the envy of Nero, tells us more of what he was. How many tables of cedar, how many ivory cabinets, how many Myrrhene vases were needed to accommodate a philosopher who preached that man should be selfcontained? The key to your study, my friend, opens the door to your secrets.

But not only is character revealed by furniture, but furniture is a necessity of ordered life. Carlyle asked us to imagine a naked House of Lords, and convinced us at once that coverings were as necessary to a legislature as circumlocutions; Huxley called on us to conceive of primitive men voting one of their number into a tree for lack of a chair, and we abandoned Locke and laughed at Rousseau, be

cause we knew that there could be no session of Parliament without seats. Carlyle wrote upon church clothes in an esoteric spirit. He took us into no actual vestry, for he had never studied in Durandus the symbolic meanings of vestments. Bishop Blougram, on the other hand, has provided us with a creed, or the apology for a creed, in the fittings for a cabin outward bound; and Gibadibs, the literary man, if he bought no cabin furniture, at least, in consequence, put his hand to the plough and "studied his last chapter of St. John." Not every one has preached to so good effect as Sylvester Blougram, in partibus episcopus!

But leaving Carlyle wrapt up in his garments, let us take a broader view. What clothes are to the individual, furniture is to the family; and the family is the true unit, for man is a social creature. The artificial upper classes may make much of the importance of the "trousseau," but the unsophisticated poor still talk of getting a home together, and mean by that the purchase of furniture. The rich find that the charm of the "trousseau" ends with the honeymoon; but adding to the furniture of a home affords romance to the poor all their lives.

"On the day that I was born," writes Mr. Barrie, "we bought six hair-bottomed chairs, and in our little house it was an event, the first great victory in a woman's long campaign.” He goes on with truth and modesty: "Neighbors came to see the boy and the chairs." The poor measure their lives by the number of their movables, and celebrate a victory in each additional ornament. So real is this pleasure that Cousin Bridget lamented to Elia that they were no longer poor, and, in consequence, no longer desired new luxuries because they could no longer triumph in their purchase.

But all classes, save the newly rich,

have their household gods; and perhaps we may account for the vulgarity of the parvenu by remembering his lack of that old furniture which guards the sanctity of home. Chairs and tables, ornaments of trifling merit, tell us not only of ourselves but of our loved ones. Blatant egotism is reproved when we sit in our father's chair, and scribble our memoranda at our greatgrandmother's escritoire. As links with the past, as linking us with others, we love these evidences of our corporate existence; we love them for themselves, and they have the merit to be as useful as if we loved them not.

We change our clothes so often; we wear them out so soon; we cannot bear to look at our old photographs because they picture us in such ridiculous garments. We turn from them with a fear of being old-fashioned, or worse unfashionable.

With furniture

the older it is the better. The clothes of princes go at last to deck a scarecrow, but the cottage dresser decorates a hall in villadom and grows in dignity with age. Our neighbors do not despise us because we inherited our chairs, but what would they say if for a moment they suspected that we wore second-hand clothes? The poor may covet the furbelows and frills of the rich, they may envy the gloss of the black coat and the gleam of the white linen; but even they would prefer new clothes if they could get them, and they are not very grateful for cast-off apparel.

I have seen Laud's cope and Wellington's Waterloo uniform. I have looked over them with veneration, but I have not wished for similar garments. How, on the other hand, I have longed for certain rooms, to see them, to inhabit them, to feel the influence of their refinement. I should like to have shared with St. Jerome, and not with his lion, that sunny scrip

torium where Dürer drew him writing. I should like to say my prayers at the little faldstool in that quiet neat chamber of St. Ursula, that Carpaccio painted. I feel that I, too, might have thrilled with the song of the birds had I awakened in Chaucer's bed; and I should have been tempted to no treach ery had I stolen from the trunk of Iachimo at midnight to survey Imogen's queenly apartment. This, you say, is mere sentiment. So it is, but are we not all sensitive to our surroundings and the better for their being beautiful? In the Bodleian Library I have felt stir within me the spirit of research, a longing for a scholarship that was not mine. I have drummed on a table beneath Panizzi's dome, impatient for my books, intending rapid reference, and eager to escape-to find more interest in a mummy case and the grotesque furniture of the dead.

All furniture is instructive even when it is not beautiful. Do not despise those chairs and tables of the early Victorian era! Well-made and ill-designed, they tell us of an age when good works and mean thoughts formed terms of alliance in the philosophy of the Utilitarians. Would Teufelsdröckh interpose? Would he maintain that crinolines and chignons are eloquent of a time when women despised God's handiwork, and destroyed their beauty by their own inventions? No. Mein Herr, your teaching is at fault. You have not read Mr. Balfour's argument on Naturalism and Esthetic. not he the authority on the significance of bonnets?

The historian after all is but the "journeyman joiner" of the past. His craft consists of ingenious dovetailing. His success in part depends on the skill with which he upholsters his scenes. He finds curtains necessary to disguise his ignorance. There was a time when he went astray and strove to reconstruct history by means

The cope of St. Martin was for long the palladium of France, and more than one nation has suffered an interdict because of a dispute as to a pallium. But even in this field furniture is superior. What a volume might be written on bedsteads (I will not write it lest you sleep), and what can compare in interest with the three great chairs of Christendom-at Westminster, at Aachen, and at Rome? But those

three chairs could only be treated properly in a separate essay. They overwhelm my imagination and afford no resting places for my fancies. ΤΟ think of them aright I pause.

H. Maynard Smith.

The concentrated criticism of words and epithets in Virgil and other classic poets often provokes discussion as to the minutiae of poetic technique which excites a certain measure of envy in those precluded from the arena of Latin and Greek scholarship. In our own literature, however, the materials of textual criticism have never been wanting. Variations in reading were a normal characteristic of the ancient manuscript, and of old it behooved the connoisseur to spare no pains in securing a good copy and a sound text. The "mere mechanic art" of copying extending over long hours, not to speak of drowsy intelligences and numbed fingers in a draughty scriptorium, will easily account for deviations without number from an authentic and accredited text; and among the numerous legacies handed on by the old scriveners to their successors in the printing office one of the least desirable was the tendency to a progressive deterioration in matters of textual accuracy. This is seen very clearly in the four well-known folio editions of ShakeLIVING AGE. VOL. XXXIV. 1795

speare's plays produced between 1623 and 1685, in which the systematic degradation of the text can be traced in a curve of monotonous regularity. The great printer-emendators of the Continent, such as Aldus Manutius, the Etiennes, the Plantins, and the Elzevirs, found few counterparts in England until in quite recent times the two University presses and such private enterprises as the Kelmscott Press and the Shakespeare Head Press at Stratford-on-Avon have set a really high standard of scholarly supervision over the operations of the composing room. The followers of most human avocations have found in Shakespeare a kindred spirit; and, not to be behind the rest, Mr. Blades once essayed a half-humorous demonstration of the hypothesis that at one period of his life the dramatist must have been a typographer. There is not a little significance, he thinks, in that phrase of Othello's in act III., scene iv., when, taking the moist plump hand of Desdemona into his own hardened palm, he exclaims, "Here's a young and sweat

"In

ing devil." The meaning that Shakespeare obviously intended to bring out by his use of the word devil was lascivious messenger, and the only trade in which a messenger or errand-boy is called a devil is the printer's. olden times," says Blades, "when speed was required a boy stood at the offside of the press, and as soon as the frisket was raised whipped the printed sheet off the tympan."

Shakespeare's intimate knowledge of these typographical mysteries did not, unhappily, prevent his plays from being very carelessly printed; and, in the absence of either scholarly printers or skilled commentators, the revision of the depraved text of 1685 was set about in a most empirical fashion. An eighteenth century satirist who represented the dramatist lying on the sick bed surrounded by quacks administering one nauseous potion after another. under the influence of which the patient relapses gradually from bad to Avorse, went hardly beyond the mark in describing emendations such as those of Warburton and Pope. The "wisest fool in Christendom, that seeond Solomon." King James I., would have probably emended Shakespeare with more discretion than Warburton. Puffed up with the insensate vanity of irrelevant learning, he altered the text with a presumption which nothing short of the most consummate verbal genius could justify, for he followed no system or principle but his own whim. The fool's remark in Lear (act III., scene iii.). "I'll speak a prophecy ere I go," he declares to be obscure. and alters thus:–“I'll speak a proph’cy or two, afore I go." The future Bishop had not "prayed his pible well" or he would have recollected the phrase in "Daniel," "or ever they came at the bottom of the den." No less characteristic is his alteration of the "earpiercing fife" in Othello, into "fearspersing fife,” a change which he

states to be demanded by the interests of euphony! Incredibly worse even than this is the hardy assertion that Puck's phrase in Midsummer Night's Dream, "Then for the third part of a minute, hence," is nonsense, and should be replaced by "the third part of the midnight.". Such proposals as these, which meet the reader on every page of his edition, well merited the savage irony of Thomas Edwards's "Canons of Criticism." His most tolerable emendation, perhaps, is that in Henry IV., First Part (II., iv.), in which he suggests that in Prince Henry's "Didst thou never see Titan kiss a dish of butter? Pitiful-hearted Titan that melted at the sweet tale of the sun"! for "pitiful-hearted Titan" we should read "pitiful-hearted butter." This, at least, has some plausibility about it; but any suggestion from the mint of Warburton is justly regarded as suspect, and the change has not been made in the best editions. The same fate, oblivion, has befallen the more ingenious but yet not quite conclusive suggestion, by one of Warbur ton's shrewder predecessors, Hanmer. that in Gonzalo's exclamation in the first scene of The Tempest, "Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, anything!" for "long heath," &c., we should read "ling. heath, broom, furze, anything."

Neither Rowe nor Pope took so much trouble with the text as is implied by an emendation of this order; they confined themselves mainly to correcting obvious misprints, omitting a few words which they could not under stand, dividing unbroken acts into scenes, and prefixing dramatis persona. Pope preluded these rather perfune tory if not wholly useless labors by a pretentious preface in which he claimed the gratitude of the intelligent world for his feats in comparing and purifying the corrupted text. As Warbur