n;
but can hardly do as much for the language in which it is expressed.
Lord Campbell quite surely meant to say that no man could possibly
_believe_, or _suppose_, or _assent to_ the proposition which he sets
forth; and when (on p. 26) he again says, "I do not _imagine_ that when
he [Shakespeare] went up to London, he carried a tragedy in his pocket,"
there can be no doubt that his Lordship meant to say, "I do not _think_
that when," etc. He should again have gathered from his Shakespearean
studies a lesson in the exact use of language, and have learned from the
lips of "that duke hight Theseus" that imagination has nothing to do
with assent to or dissent from a proposition, but that
"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
* * * * *
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."
_A Midsummer Night's Dream_, Act V. Sc. 1.
We would not protract this finding of faults, and will only add, that,
when his Lordship says, (p. 116,) that Henry V. "astonished the world
with his universal _wisdom_" he entirely overlooks the fact, that wisdom
is a faculty of the mind, or, rather, a mode of intellectual action,
of which universality can no more be predicated than of folly, or of
honesty, or of muscular strength; and that it is not knowledge, or
at all like knowledge; which, indeed, is often acquired in a very
remarkable degree by persons eminent for unwisdom. Lord Campbell might
as well have said that Henry V. astonished the world with his universal
prowess in the battle-field.
The censure to which Mr. Rushton's pamphlet is occasionally open in
regard to style may properly be averted by the modesty of its tone and
its unpretending character.
But to pass from the manner to the matter of the learned gentlemen who
appear on behalf of Malone's theory. Lord Campbell, after stating, in
the introductory part of his letter, that in "The Two Gentlemen of
Verona," "Twelfth Night," "Julius Caesar," "Cymbeline," "Timon of
Athens," "The Tempest," "King Richard II.," "King Henry V.," "King Henry
VI., Part I.," "King Henry VI., Part III.," "King Richard III.," "King
Henry VIII.," "Pericles," and "Titus Andronicus,"--fourteen of the
thirty-seven dramas generally attributed to Shakespeare,--he finds
"nothing that fairly bears upon this controversy," goes
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