the common reader better than a more learned difcuffion : • The multitude of oaths prove nothing. That vow alone is valuable which is founded on truth and fanctified by religion. Could you poffibly believe me, though I should appeal to heaven for the truth of what I uttered, when, at the fame time, I was acting against my honour and my confcience ?' DIAN A. Since Frenchmen are so braid. The word braid, I believe, means practifed, accustomed, or beaten to a thing. Bray a fool in a mortar.' BERTRAM. By an abstract of success. That is, by an abstract, or memorandum, of what I have taken down fucceffively in order.' So, in the Merry Wives of Windfor, Mrs. Ford tells Falstaff, who wants to hide himself in her apartment, that her husband C 3 husband keeps an abstract of every thing that is in that chamber. I DE M. The bufinefs is not done, as fearing to hear of it hereafter. Bertram means his intrigue with Diana. • If the confequence of our meeting should be a child, I may chance to be called upon to maintain it.' I DE M. Entertained my convoy. • Made a bargain with the men who are to attend me in my journey, and take care of my baggage, &c.' • Con him' is a Scottish phrase, and still in ufe. I DE M. He is a cat ftill. Bertram calls him a cat three times, as a mark of great and incurable aversion. All All his phrases of that kind are to be understood as in the Jew's lift of antipathies in the Merchant of Venice: Some that are mad if they behold a cat. PAROLLES. He will steal eggs out of a cloister. This has the fame meaning as to rob the 'fpital.' IDEM. Faith, fir, he has led the drum before the English tragedians. It was formerly cuftomary with the English itinerant players, and perhaps peculiar to them, to announce the play by beat of drum, and at the same time to diftribute bills of the play to the populace. PAROLLES, SOLUS. Yet am I thankful. If my heart were great, This fcene always afforded much pleafure to the audience. Upon its last revival, it was acted with fuch theatrical skill as excited general merriment. The unbinding Parolles, who looked about him with anxious furprize and terror, redoubled the bursts of laughter which echoed round the theatre. Woodward was excellent in the whole scene, but particularly in characterizing Bertram and the Dumaines, whofe feelings, upon the unexpected heap of flander which he threw upon them, served to heighten the scene. Bertram was moft angry, because Parolles deviated very little from the truth in what he faid of him; his lafciviousness, and his intrigue with Diana, he could not deny. In all our comic writers, I know not where to meet with fuch an odd compound of cowardice, folly, ignorance, pertnefs, and effrontery, with certain femblances of courage, fenfe, knowledge, adroitness, and wit, as Parolles. He is, I think, inferior only to the great master of stage gaiety and mirth, Sir John Falstaff. Beffus, Beffus, in the King and no King of Beaumont and Fletcher, is, I know, highly extolled, as a great original, by fome writers; and particularly by Mr. Seward, a very able commentator upon Beaumont and Fletcher, as a character second only to the inimitable Fat Knight. That Beffus might, in his own days, be esteemed as a juft portrait of an impudent boafter and a blafted coward, and one who profeffed to fight according to the rules of Caranza and Saviolino, thofe great adepts in the art of challenging and fighting, I shall not deny; but this I will venture to fay, that he is fo widely different from any character we fee at present, that no comic poet of this age will undertake his revival, even with confiderable alterations; he is fo outrageously distorted, in in every and feature, that nothing but a new creation will do for Beffus. limb Soon after his prefent majesty's acceffion, Mr. Garrick intended to have brought forward to the public the King and no King of |