there was some allusion in this play by the name Edmund, which is given to one of the characters, Mr. Peckham's name being Edmund, and the principal actor being Father Edmunds. Edmund, it will be observed, is a name originating in a different language and at a different period from Lear, Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia. I believe Dr. Warburton was the person who first noticed that the names of the spirits in King Lear corresponded with some of those in Harsnet's Declaration. Such discoveries are really substantial and valuable contributions to Shakespeare literature.

There are two passages in the play not connected with Edgar's wild talk, in which we may trace the reading of the Poet in this book of Harsnet's.

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
VAUNT COURIERS of oak-cleaving thunder-bolts,
Singe my white head!

ACT. iii. sc. 2.

This very rare word occurs in Harsnet. He calls one of the Peckhams "the harbinger, the host, the steward, the vaunt-courier, the sacrist, and the pander" to the priests.Edit. 1605, p. 12.

Again,

O, how this mother swells up towards my heart!
HYSTERICA PASSIO!-down thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element 's below.

Acr. ii. sc. 4.

Thus Harsnet:-"Master Maynie had a spice of the Hysterica Passio as seems from his youth: he himself terms it The Mother, as you may see in his confession, and saith that he was much troubled with it in France, and that it was one of the causes that moved him to leave his Holy Order whereinto he was initiated, and to return into England," p. 25. "Thy elements below" accords exactly with some notices of the peculiar nature of the disease by Harsnet in a later portion of the book.

To perceive the propriety of representing Edgar assuming the disguise in which he appears in the greater part of the play, we should remember that such persons as he pretended to be were actually to be found roving about the country in the days of Shakespeare. Aubrey, in whose unpublished writings we find more information respecting the opinions and ways of the common people than in any other original source, in his Natural History of Wiltshire, says :-"Till the breaking out of the Civil Wars, Tom o' Bedlams did travel about the country. They had been once distracted men that had been put into Bedlam, where recovering to some soberness they were licentiated to go a begging. They had on their left arms an armilla of tin, about four inches long; they could not get it off. They wore about their necks a great horn of an ox in a string or bawdrick, which when they came to a house for alms they did wind; and they did put the drink given them into this horn, whereto they did put a stopple. Since the wars, I do not remember to have seen any of them." Edgar, we find, carries a horn.

III. 4. EDGAR.
Bless thy five WITS.

Five wits were undoubtedly the five senses. Thus in Larke's Book of Wisdom, "And this knowledge descendeth and cometh of the five corporal senses and wits of the persons, as the eyes, understanding, and hearing of the ears, smell of the nose, taste of the mouth," and more plainly in King Henry the Eighth's Primer, 1546, "My five wits have I fondly misused and spent, in hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and also feeling, which thou hast given me to use unto thy honour and glory, and also to the edification and profit of my neighbours.'

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III. 4. Edgar.

This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibet; he begins at curfew and walks till the first cock.

The peculiar force of this passage seems not to be observed by the commentators. Gloster's torch is seen in the distance, when the fool says, "Look, here comes a walking fire;" when Edgar, speaking in the character he had assumed, says it is Flibbertigibet, which seems to be a name for the Will of the Wisp. Hence the propriety of "He begins at curfew and walks till the crowing of the cock," that is, is seen in all the dark of night.

III. 6. EDGAR.

Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim,
Hound or paniel, brach or LYM.

There is much in the notes on the kind of dog intended by "lym." Mr. Malone comes to the conclusion that a blood-hound is meant. But Sir John Harington, in the notes to the forty-first book of the Orlando, says :66 Olivero, whose device is the spaniel or lyam hound couching with the words Fin che vegna, doth with great modesty shew thereby that the spaniel or hound, that is at command, much waiteth till the fowls or deer be stricken, and then boldly leapeth into the water, or draweth after it by land, &c." Harington adopted this device for himself, and in the frontispiece to his translation of Ariosto a lime hound may be seen depicted.

I stumbled when I saw: Full oft 'tis seen,

Our means secure us; and our mere defects
Prove our commodities,

I would propose the following as a conjectural emendation of a passage which cannot be right as it now stands:

I stumbled when I saw : Full oft 'tis seen

Our meanness succours us; and our mere defeets

Prove our commodities.

IV. 6. EDGAR.

Come on, sir, here's the place:-stand still.-How fearful

And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low, &c.

The incident of the cliff is so extravagantly improbable that there is no defending it, and we tolerate it only as having given occasion to this which is Shakespeare's only great attempt at describing a particular piece of scenery.

He had probably been at Dover, and sketched the scene upon the place. He evidently prepares the reader for the passage by several allusions to Dover in the earlier parts of the play, and, except for the sake of introducing these descriptive lines, one cannot see why Glo'ster should be led so far as Dover, when he might so easily have executed his purpose elsewhere. There is an obscurity thrown (purposely I think) over the topography of this play.

Dr.

Shakespeare was himself sensible of the improbability, and Edgar says, "This is above all strangeness." Johnson says, "This scene and the stratagem by which Glo'ster is cured of his desperation are wholly borrowed from Sidney's Arcadia, book ii. ;" but this is a mistake. It is true we have a blind king who seeks the brow of a rock with the intention of throwing himself headlong. He asks his son to conduct him thither. So far the stories are coincident, but the improbable part is not yet entered upon; and, so far from Shakespeare having here followed Sidney, or having any countenance from a more cautious writer of fiction, the son in the Arcadia even refuses to conduct his father to the spot. Shakespeare, as far as our knowledge at present goes, must be answerable in his own proper person and alone for what is too improbable to give as an incident any degree of pleasure.

At the same time he may have owed the conception of that particular mode of suicide to Sidney, since the passage occurs in that part of the Arcadia to which he owed, according to Steevens, the episodical incidents of Glo'ster, Edmund, and Edgar. But there actually occurred in Shakespeare's time the incident of a London merchant committing suicide by throwing himself headlong from the tower of one of the churches.