IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) t ^ // ^/ :/. «•- 1.0 I.I 1.25 2.8 Iff 140 M M U 1 1.6 V] / ^;. V /A Photographic Sdences Corporation d ^ \ \\ ^ in his soliloquy with the reflection that he is forgetting his work. " Hut these thoughts," he continues, " which occupy my mind, ([uite refresh my labours and keep me busiest when with my iiands I am doing least." This note is taken from Dr. Robert Chambers' copy of the Collier Emendations, likewise in my possession. He has therein made seve- ral other manuscript notes of his own. It would appear that in the old volume corrected by the annotator, some pages were missing, and some were daT7iaged. ()n this circumstanc-. Dr. Chambers makes the observation : " It is greatly to be regretted that the corrected folio has had a leaf here and there abstracted from it. Valuable improve- ments in the common text have thus, no doubt, been lost." Dr. Robert Chambers ha.s also this remark : "There can be no doubt that this corrector had access to some means of information — stage copies of the plays, MS., or otherwise — which we do not now possess." "A writer in the Dublin UiiiveHity Magazine, in 1868," he continues, " very sensibly says ; 'It seems to me strange how any intelligent, thoughtful, unbiased reader can doubt the self-evident rightness of all the more important emendations contained in the Collier folio. Whoever put them there, they speak for themselves ; even in the case of the table of green frieze.' " 8 entering into tb(3 particulars of the question, not only to mark it with tho symbol of her disapprobation, but also in an otf-hand manner to Hti^matize it in the margin of her copy thuB, "this is all stupid and quite inavlinissible " (but Hee CbamberH' remarks at the close of footnote just given). In '* Antony and Cleopatra," Act 1, Sc. 1, "soaring " for '• lowering " is approved of, but in Act 4, Sc. 8, " gests " (deeds) for " guestH" is rejected. In 'Twelfth Night," Act 5, Sc. 1, *' foot" is considered an improvement on "soul.'' In certain inhtances it would appear Mrs. Jameson her- self had anticipated the old corrector. In '• All's Well That Ends Well," Act 3, Sc. 2, she appends the note, •'• I hf \ made thin correction in my ShakeHpeare "; and in " The Taming of the Shrew," Act 4, Sc. 4, she says in almost the same terms, *' I had made this correction years ago in my own Shakespeare." After three of the plays ani.olated in this work Mrs. Jameson has pencilled down some g. neral observations of her own which will be read with interest. After '• Mea- sure for Measure," Hhe says : " This play has always appeared to me the most difficult and corrupted in point of language of any of Shakespear^f's plays." A similar remark is made upon " Love's Labour's Lost " : *' This is another of the moat ditficult of Shakespeare's plays in the language and allusions." And to " Troilus and Cressida," she Hubjoins : " This also is one of the mout difficult of the plays and one of the most wonderful in point of lan- gua^ ae '»♦ 2, run-away 's In " Romeo and Juliet," Act 3, Sc is corrected into " enemies," and marked " plausible " by *In ISfvl, Redfield of New York published a one-volume edition of Shakespeare, edited by G. S. Duyckinck, with all the Collier ensen- dations incorporated in the text ; adding the old readings at the foot of each i)age. Consulting this work we are brought, as it seems to me, nearer to Shakespeare himself than we are in any other edition of his plays. To have render«d the volume more complete, the " Son- nets" should have been arranged in the order indicated by Gerald Massey, with the interpretations of that acute writer appended to each. (See " Shakespeare's Sonnets, never before interpreted ; his private friends identihed." By Gerald Massey. London : Longmans, Green and Company. 1860.) Mrs. Jameson, (l leuieruber ouuu HUggeating " ErinnyH " for this *' run away'fl," Erinnys lo ho taken to mean the civic diecord reigning at the tina<< in Verona.) It is pleasant to observe that the orthography of ShaiieHpeare'H name employed by y , Jameson is that employed by Shaliejpeare himself in the only two instancrs wh'!. > we poHsesH o, Inn signature us printed and of courhO net" and revised by himself, thus having a literal impri- matur of his own 'iuthority. These instances of course are the " William Suvkkspeake," " William Siiakeh- PEAitE," appended by liis own hand to the dedications ')f the " Venus and Adonis " and " Lucrece," respectively, to the Earl of iSouthampton. The few rfum/ " "a; authentic autographs of Shakespeare are all of thfui . .ore or less difficult to decipher. After deciding on *hi' full digni- fied form of his nanin which he elect*. 1 to ndopt w*. a affixing his signature to ihe ^wo dedicat.^ns to the r*rl cf Southhampton he may have often from habit ir through itia^.h ' rtence signed his nr.me in one or o*ue»-ot the old ways, which ho had benn wont io make use of previously. It can be shown that in the Elizabethan era j ersons of even good oalture and high rank vo-iied without scrupii^ the form of their family nanjes when producing them on paper. Thus Kaleigh and Rawleii^h and Ratvley were interchangeable. In wetting his name oiice for all as " Wil- Ijam Shakespeare," the dramatist had doubtless in his mind the divers ways in which the name was pronounced and phonetically written among illiterate provincials at Strat- ford and in Warwickshire irenerally — all this he desired to put a stop to, in his own case at least ; and his friends, Heminge and Condell, Ben Jonson, and most others, seem to have humoured him in this respect and always spelt the name as he himself had suh.scribed it when sign- ing the dedications to the Earl of Southampton. The tablet to the memory of his wife in the ohurch at Stratford reads : " Here lyeth interred the body of Anne, wife of Mr. William Shakespeare, who departed this life the 6th day of Augtjst, 1623, being of the &ge of 67 years." Some eight or ten varieties have been enumer- ated of the form of the word Shakespeare, all of them ■^ 10 vk? 'I; H representing the provincial pronunciation which seems to have made the first syllable of the word short — Shak, not Shake — hence even among the better educated from Shakespeare's time downwards the form Shakspeare has been considered by no means objectionable. On the tablet under the bust in Stratford Church it is thus written. Chaucer in his day, like the Anglo Saxons before him, might write spere for speare, but in 1598 this orthography had become obsolete, and thus scarcely conveyed to the common mind an idea of the spear which figured in the Shakespeare shield of arms as '* on a bend a speare the point upward," and again in the crest in which a spear appears in the claw of a falcon in an upright position, and quivering in motion as we may suppose with allusion to the word shake, formerly the first syllable in the family name. This abbreviation of the first syllable in form as well as in sound, in compound dissyllables is quite in accordance with the genius of the English language, as may be observed in such words as vinyard, shepherd, breakfast, wisdom, knowledge, nothing, etc. An unfortunate adherence to the current orthography of the word spear led at a later time to a form of the poet's name, which to us now seems singularly ungraceful. Alexander Pope, in his elaborate edition of the poet's works, uses throughout the form Shakespear. This would be in the reign of Anne or George the First. The form of the name employed by a very distinguished modem oriental scholar was the same, as £ gather from the title- page of a work of his now before me : — " Muntakhabat-I- Hindi ; or Selections in Hindustani with Verbal Trans- lations or Particular Vocabularies and a Grammatical Analysis of some parts, for the use of Students of that Language. By John Shakespear." Printed in London in 1852, and dedicated to tho Chairman and Directors of the East India Company. This learned man was a Professor in Addiscombe College. He generously presented the sum of £2,500 in furtherance of the scheme for preserving, as national property, the house and surrounding premises of the great dramatist at Strat- ford-on-Avon. Another distinguished person of the same name was Sir Richmond Shakespear, a gallant general of 11 artillery, who did good service iu India, and died in 1861. We have in the Dominion of Canada a family bearing the great dramatist's name. The present postmaster of the city of Victoria, in British Columbia, is a Shakes- peare, writing his ni. me in the full dignified form now almost everywhere adopted among English literary men. His baptismal name is Noah. The relic of Mrs. Jameson, which has given rise to the composition of this paper, I value all the more from the fact that a good many years ago I wa^ so fortunate as to become personally acq^iainted with that writer under very pleasant circumstances. She was for several days an honoured guest in a house where I was myself at the time domiciled. I was thus brought under the spell, as it were, of that influence which she everywhere so remark- ably exercised, and had many opportunitifs of enjoying her conversation, which richly teemed with anecdotes and incidents connected with numberless distiuguished per- sons of modern and earlier times ; all most aptly and tastefully reproduced. This was at Sorel, some miles below Montreal, at the oflicial summer residence of the Commander-in-Chief of the forces, thon Sir John Colborne, of two of whose sons I was in charge as private tutor, Mrs. Jameson being on her way to New York through Montreal, after her memorable excursion to Lake Huron and the Sault, so well described in her " Summer Rambles in Canada." Sir John Colborne had invited her to pay a visit to him at Sorel. I thus, of course, on several occa- sions had pleasant little interchanges of thought with her, finding her always very frank and ready, most usefully and with great tact to indicate the crudities and inaccura- cies which she might detect in any speaker. She exhibited a kindly inclination to make a special favourite of one of Sir John's daughters on account of her Shakespearian name — " Cordelia." Mrs. Jameson had with her numerous beautiful water-colour sketches taken during her late tour, together with many etchings by her own hand ; for one of which, representing a child sleeping in the open air under the shadow of a tree in a wood, I remember I furnished a scrap from Horace to be appended to it as a kind of motto, which much pleased her, viz. : no7i sine dts animoaus infans ; -i^« 12 as did also a certain trifling extract from Henry Cornelius Agrippa's " Vanity of the Sciences," proving that in his time (1486-1535) the charivari customs, common among the habitans of Lower Canada, were well known in Germany. ''■ Mra. Jameson was a perfect proficient in music, vocal and intrumcntal, with a voice gentle and soft, accompany- ing hertelf in a very quiet and simple manner. The hands of Mrs. Jameson wore remarkably beautiful. How their extreme whiteness and delicacy were preserved during the unavoidable inconveniences and exposures of the recent extensive canoe trip was a mystery, but I think in rela- tion to some allusion to this escape [ overheard a strong hint given to one of her young lady friends, that never under any circumstances must the hands be ungloved for one moment in the out-of-door air, or sun li^ht, a precept enforced by a reiterated emphatic never. I also gathered that a Bible and a Shakespeare were almost the sole literary companions of her voyage, and that a small sti- letto or poignard was secretly carried for self-defence if there should be any need. And once I recollect in allu- sion to her safety in the journey just accomplished she good-humouredly repeated some lines from a familiar song of Dibdin's : " They say there's a Providence sits up aloft, to keep watch for the life of poor Jack." In addition to the annotated volume I have an autograph letter of Mrs. Jameson addressed in playful strain to Mr. Jameson before her marriage ; likewise some letters writ- ten by her to Mrs. McMurray at the Sault, wife of the Rev. Dr. McMurray. Mrs. McMurray was a woman after Mrs. Jameson's own heart, highly gifted and possessed of all noble womanly and motherly qualities, of a stately form and fine presence generally ; moreover what would be a circumstance of the most intense interest to Mrs. Jameson herself, as would bo visible at the first glance to a stranger, in her veins flowed the blood of the aboriginal people of the country. On her mother's side, of chief- tain's rank she had been highly educated and spoke with ♦ A sketch-book of Mrs. Jameson's, containing many views taken during her visit to Canada, is in the possesBion of Mr. Bain, principal librarian of the Toronto Public Library. 13 rs. to ith greal refinement the Otchipway language. Dr. McMurray was the first Anglican missionary at the Sault, and curiously enough was the first person at that place to be entrusted with a oomo-ission of the peace by a Dedimus Potestatem from the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province. The works of Mrs. Jameson which I have contrived to place upon my shelvet are the following : " Sacred and Legendary Art," 2 voh. ; " The Monastic Orders in Art," 2 vols. ; " The History oi Our Lord as exemplified in Art," 2 vols, (the completion by Lady Eadtlake), all copiously illustrated ; " Memoirs and Essays " ; " Memoirs of Female Sovereigns," 2 vols. ; " Visits and Sketches includ- ing the Diary of an Ennuyea " ; '• Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada," 3 vols. ; " Thoughts, Memoirs and Fancies " ; " Social Life in Germany," and the •'Characteristics of Women"; the edition which I have of the last-mentioned work is the one published in New York, of which the peculiarity is that its preface is dated from Toronto, and several etchings on copper-plate are inserted in it, executed by the hand of Mrs. Jameson herself, not in the London edition. As an introduction to '* The Characteristics of Women " there is to be seen an imaginary conversation between Alda, evidently the authoress, and a friend Medon. The nice and clever way in whinh the talk passes across and back between the speakers in the dialogue is a good specimen of the style of conversation which was sure to arise between the gifted Mrs. Jameson and a party of intelligent friends. Alda and Medon figure likewise in similar conversations, prefixed to " Vi&its and Sketches " and ** Social Life in Germany." All Mrs. Jameson's books show a noble ambition to elevate the female character, and to suggest worthy employments for female gifts. To her is in a great measure due the insti- tution of the Sisterhoods of Charity, in modern times ho useful in our hospitals. I have added to my collection the " Memcirs " of Mrs. Jameson, by her niece, Geraldine Macpberson, published in 1878. The frontispiece to this work consists of a miniature portrait, showing Mrs. Jameson as quite young. She is represented pointing upwards with her left hand, as isa 1? u if listening. Another portrait taken in middle life of a much larger size in general circulation gives the figure in much the same attitude, which somewhat resembles that of Mrb. Siddons in the well-known representation of her as the " Muse of Tragedy." A third portrait appears in later volumes showing Mrs. Jameson in her old age, a very pleasing and natural picture. The head is partially oorered with a black kerchief, which falls negligently from the back of the head. In the South Kensington Museum there was to be seen in the year 1867 a grcnd marble bust of Mrs. Jameson, executed by the celebrated sculptor, John Gibson. Mrs. Jameson, it should be added, departed this life in 1860. In later years I formed the acquaintance of the husband of Mrs. Jameson at Toronto. He was a man highly edu- cated and possessing great taste, and even skill, in respect of art. He was a connoisseur and collector of fine edi- tions. His conversation was charged with reminiscences and anecdotes of the celebrated occupants of the lake district of Westmoreland, the Coleridges, Wordsworths and Southey, with all of whom he had been intimate in his youth. The "Sonnets" in Hartley Coleridge's little volumft, addressed •* To a Friend," were, in fact, addressed to Mr. Jameson. Before his appointment in Can- ada he had been a judge in one of the West India Islands. Here he was appointed the Chief of the First Equity Court of the Province, under the title of Vice-Chancellor, the theory being that the Governor was the Chancellor. In Toronto Mr. Jameson inhabited a villa situated in what are now the grounds of the Loretto Convent on Front Street. II MIIM I ■*m^i i»BIWF»VtWa**»(-ww