MINOR CORRESPONDENCE.

THE

GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE.

The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley; with Notes, by W. Gifford, Esq. and Life by Rev. Alexander Dyce. 6 vols. THE declaration of Lord Brougham, that it is better to assist in supporting and enriching old hospitals than in constructing new ones, we take the liberty of appropriating and carrying on into the category of books; for, without any wish to disparage the multifarious and overflowing literature of the present day, or to interfere with the pleasure which so many persons derive from it, we still cling with old affection and with many deeply-rooted associations to those whose works were the teachers of our youth, the exercise of our manhood, and, we hope, will be the delight and recreation of our declining age. But whether old or new, the admonition that is necessary to be kept in mind is, that the book should be good. It was Cicero's saying,-" Lectionem sine ullá delectatione negligo;" I hate reading where no pleasure is. And a sensible old writer in his quaint language has told us," Idle books are the licensed follies of the age, that, like a corrupt air, infect wherever they come."

In introducing the present work to the notice of our readers we have the advantage of recalling a name that was never mentioned but with honour in the period when the author lived, though it has fallen into a neglect which we may call unmerited in later times. Shirley was the last of our old dramatists; his name closes that illustrious list of dramatic writers which, commencing, we may say, with Peele and Green, rose in its meridian glory under the genius of Shakespeare, and, adorned with the great names of Jonson, Fletcher, Marlow, and others, was suddenly and forcibly obscured by the violent interference of a gloomy fanaticism. With the splendour of the crown sank also the genius of the stage, "the poor player" accompanied the fallen monarch. The pulpit was victorious over the stage: sermons usurped the place of tragedies: the "short-haired men" drove out the gallants with their lovelocks; and when at the Restoration the theatres reopened it was with an altered taste in the audience and an inferior talent in the poet. It was then that the name of Shirley was for the first time coupled with terms of contempt which must excite our wonder, considering the source from which they came. That censure of the day has however passed away, and justice has been done to his various and great merits. Mr. Gifford, who had devoted much time and thought to our dramatic poetry, and who had published very excellent editions of Jonson, Massinger, and Ford, as his last labour endeavoured to restore Shirley to his proper rank in public estimation by making his works accessible to the public, and presenting them also in a corrected form. But this was a toil that even his sagacity could only partially accomplish, for so thoroughly cor

* An expression of Shirley's.

+ We allude to Dryden's Mac Flecknoe,

Heywood and Shirley were but types of thee, &c.

See Life by Dyce, p. lxi.

rupted was the text of the old editions that sometimes he was obliged to rest contented with a vague conjecture, and sometimes to relinquish the task of correction in despair. The work was still unfinished when he died, and it was very judiciously placed in Mr. Dyce's hands for completion, who added the best Life of the poet we possess, and arranged the last volume for the press. Acknowledging as we freely and cheerfully do that the present improved text of Shirley owes much to Mr. Gifford's labours, we still know, and he himself was conscious of it, that he still left much error to be removed, and many latent readings to be brought to light by more patient attention or more fortunate discovery. The established text of all authors, ancient or modern, has been the result of combined labours. Homer has had a hundred commentators, and Shakespeare nearly as many; and such is the nature of conjectural criticism that the inferior critic will often succeed when the greater one has failed. Heringa, in his Notes on Manilius, passed successfully over ground which Bentley himself had trodden in vain; and Theobald set right the sense which neither Pope nor Warburton had the acuteness to discover. With this explanation of our purpose, and with the hope that we have, by a patient attention to the style and manner of the author, and by a constant reference to the original copies of plays, been able to do some part of the critic's duty, we shall feel sufficiently recompensed if we shall have lightened the labour of any succeeding editor, and cleared away a few of the numerous obstructions he will find in his path. We now proceed to give a brief outline of Shirley's life, as an interesting introduction to his poetry.

James Shirley was descended from what he has called an ancient family of the Shirleys in Sussex, or, as some say, Warwickshire. He was born near the Stocks Market, in the parish of St. Mary Woolchurch, London, in September 1596.* In 1608, when he was twelve years old, he went to Merchant-Taylors' School, and was removed in 1612 to St. John's college, Oxford. He appears to have pursued his studies diligently at school, and even to have displayed superior abilities. Anthony Wood says, "Dr. William Laud presiding at that house, he had a very great affection for him, especially for the pregnant parts that were visible in him; but, then having a broad or large mole upon his cheek, which some esteemed a deformity, that worthy doctor would often tell him that he was an unfit person to take the sacred function upon him, and should never have his consent to do so." Leaving the university without a degree, he removed to Catharine Hall, Cambridge, having for his contemporary Thomas Bancroft the epigrammatist, who has recorded the circumstance in one of his epigrams. Here he probably obtained a degree, though no documentary evidence of it exists, and, after entering into orders, obtained some preferment near St. Alban's. In 1618 he published a poem called "Eccho, or the Infortunate Lovers," of which no copy is known to exist. It is said to be the same piece which he again printed in 1646, under the

* The author of the memoir on Shirley, in Brit. Bibliographer, vol. iv. p. xi. says 1594 by mistake.

+ See Bancroft's Epigrams, 4to. 1639, book i. ep. 13.

In a memorandum of Dr. Farmer he is called " James Shirley, B.A." in a copy of Shirley's poems; but we do not understand the following conclusion of Mr. Dyce: "And, as we afterwards find him holding Church preferment. have graduated Master of Arts." Why so? It is not n Arts to hold Church preferment.-EDIT.

at in due time

be Master of

title of "Narcissus, or the Self-Lover," with the motto " Hæc olim," indicating that it was a youthful performance. "Being unsettled in his mind," says Anthony Wood, "he changed his religion for that of Rome, and left his living." What induced this change does not appear, but it was a period of unsettled opinion and violent theological animosity. He now became a teacher in the grammar school at St. Alban's for about two years, 1623 and 1624; when, tired of the drudgery of tuition, he returned to the metropolis, lived in Gray's Inn, and set up for a play-maker. His comedy of "Love Tricks," Mr. Dyce thinks, was performed before he came to London.* So fertile was his genius, and so successful his dramas, that Wood says, "He gained, not only a considerable livelyhood, but also very great respect and incouragement, from persons of quality, especially from Henrietta Maria, the queen consort, who made him her servant.' Shirley was not a court-poet or courtier: he says, "I never affected the ayr of flattery; some say I have lost my preferment by not practising that court sin.' He was twice married, and had several children.

But

And now dark and unpropitious days were approaching to playwrights and players, "who then were heard no more. The first ordinance of both Houses of Parliament for the suppression of stage plays throughout the kingdom was issued in Sept. 1642. "When the rebellion broke out," says Wood, "he was forced to leave London, and, with his wife an children, who were afterwards put to their shifts, he was invited by the Marquis of Newcastle to take his fortunes with him in the wars." Whether he assisted his noble patron much with the sword does not appear, but Wood says he did with his pen; and Mr. Dyce discovered a drinking song in the Duke's comedy of a Country Captain" printed among Shirley's poems. When the King's cause declined, Shirley took up his residence obscurely in London, when he was assisted by his friend Thomas Stanley, and afterwards re-established himself as schoolmaster in Whitefriars, where he not only gained a comfortable subsistence, “but educated many ingenious youths, who afterwards proved most eminent in divers faculties." Mr. Dyce says, "That he was fully competent to perform the duties of an instructor is evinced by his grammatical treatises; and there is every reason to believe that he pursued this honourable employment, in easy though not affluent circumstances, till the termination of his life." In 1646 he published a small octavo volume of poems, some of which had appeared in his plays, and most of them were probably the effusions of his youth.‡ In the following year he assisted in publishing the dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher, and soon afterwards a small Latin grammar, of which the following is a specimen :

In di, do, dum, the gerunds chime and close;
Um the first supine, u the latter shows.

* It would seem that Shirley had no forethought at that time of his future dramatic labours or fame, for he says

This play is

The first fruits of a muse that before this
Never saluted audience, nor doth mean
To swear himself a factor for the scene.

+ The song is that, “Come, let us throw the Dice," at the opening of Act IV. in vol. vi. p. 439 of Gifford's edition.

Among the Rawlinson MSS. in the Bodleian Library at Oxford is one of Shirley's poems, which differs much from the printed copy, besides possessing several unprinted ones. See pref. p. xlvi.

a couplet which affected a friend of ours very considerably when we unexpectedly read it to him, and which we presume, therefore, has other merits besides its neatness and precision. In 1656 appeared "The Rudiments of Grammar in English verse," and a Manuductio. In 1660 some dramatic productions which we have marked in their places. At the Restoration several of his pieces were successfully revived; but he had ceased writing for the stage. Wood says he assisted Ogilby in his translation of Homer and Virgil. At length," says Wood, "after he had lived in various conditions, and had seen much of the world, he and his second wife Frances were driven by the dismal conflagration that happened in London in 1666 from their habitation near Fleet Street into the parish of St. Giles's-in-the-Fields in Middlesex, where, being in a manner overcome with affrightments, disconsolations, and other miseries, occasioned by that fire and their losses, they both died within the compass of a natural day." They were buried in St. Giles's Church 29th October, 1666. Shirley was in his 71st year. There is a portrait of him in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, in which he appears a dark, swarthy, poetical sort of personage, with large black eyes and luxuriant locks. In his description Mr. Dyce says, "He was gentle, modest, and full of sensibility," which is indeed, though as lofty commendation as we could wish, most fully believed by us. He was a very fertile poet. "No single writer," the Editor says, "has bequeathed, with the exception of Shakspeare, so many regular five-act pieces to posterity." Thirty-three regular dramas are printed in Mr. Gifford's edition. Most of his plays are tragi-comedies, and we agree in the judgment that, in comparison with most of our old dramas, "The muse of Shirley is chaste and decent." Mr. Dyce has summed up his poetical merits, and in the poetical balance they are made far to outweigh his defects.

LOVE TRICKS; OR THE SCHOOL OF COMPLIMENT. This is Shirley's first performance. He says in the prologue,

It was printed in 1631, 1637, and 1667. Pepys mentions in his Diary that he went to see it represented: "A silly play, only Miss Davies, dancing in a shepherd's clothes, did please us mightily." Mr. Dyce thinks, and justly, "that it is the work of an inexperienced writer, but of one who gives rich promise of future excellence;" and he adds, "The scene of the Compliment School in the third act, the satire of which is chiefly directed against the books of polite instruction so common in Shirley's days, can only be relished by a reader who has examined these preposterous treatises.” P. 23.-Bubulcus. He's out of sight; it was but a cowardly thing for me to run away. Antonio. Be buzzard now; the stag can't use her feet, &c.

"buzzard"

We think Mr. Gifford has unnecessarily corrupted the text by altering "Be buzzard now," into "The bee may buzz" now, &c is always considered as a "cowardly fowl" among the' read, "The buzzard! now the stam

Farely

we should
into