the first touch. The _Yorkshire Tragedy_ is a coarse, crude,
and vigorous impromptu, in which we possibly might almost think it
possible that Shakespeare had a hand (or at least a finger), if we had
any reason to suppose that during the last ten or twelve years of his
life {232} he was likely to have taken part in any such dramatic
improvisation.

The example and the exposure of Schlegel's misadventures in this line
have not sufficed to warn off minor blunderers from treading with emulous
confidence "through forthrights and meanders" in the very muddiest of
their precursor's traces. We may notice, for one example, the revival--or
at least the discussion as of something worth serious notice--of a
wellnigh still-born theory, first dropped in a modest corner of the
critical world exactly a hundred and seventeen years ago. Its parent,
notwithstanding this perhaps venial indiscretion, was apparently an
honest and modest gentleman; and the play itself, which this ingenuous
theorist was fain, with all diffidence, to try whether haply he might be
permitted to foist on the apocryphal fatherhood of Shakespeare, is not
without such minor merits as may excuse us for wasting a few minutes on
examination of the theory which seeks to confer on it the factitious and
artificial attraction of a spurious and adventitious interest.

"The Raigne of King Edward the third: As it hath bin sundrie times plaied
about the Citie of London," was published in 1596, and ran through two or
three anonymous editions before the date of the generation was out which
first produced it. Having thus run to the end of its natural tether, it
fell as naturally into the oblivion which has devoured, and has not again
disgorged, so many a more precious production of its period. In 1760 it
was reprinted in the "Prolusions" of Edward Capell, whose text is now
before me. This editor was the first mortal to suggest that his newly
unearthed treasure might possibly be a windfall from the topless tree of
Shakespeare. Being, as I have said, a duly modest and an evidently
honest man, he admits "with candour" that there is no jot or tittle of
"external evidence" whatsoever to be alleged in support of this
gratuitous attribution: but he submits, with some fair show of reason,
that there is a certain "resemblance between the style of" Shakespeare's
"earlier performances and of the work in question"; and without the
slightest show of any reason whatever he appends to th