at gentleman is the ostensible
editor of Clotilde's poesies of the fifteenth century, some ingenious
persons are unlucky in this world! Perhaps one day we may yet discover
that this "romantic adventure" of _Milton_ and _Justine de Levis_ is not
so original as it seems--it may lie hid in the _Astree_ of D'Urfe, or
some of the long romances of the Scuderies, whence the English and the
French Chattertons may have drawn it. To such literary inventors we say
with Swift:--

----Such are your tricks;
But since you hatch, pray own your chicks!

Will it be credited that for the enjoyment of a temporary piece of
malice, Steevens would even risk his own reputation as a poetical
critic? Yet this he ventured, by throwing out of his edition the poems
of Shakspeare, with a remarkable hyper-criticism, that "the strongest
act of parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into
their service." Not only he denounced the sonnets of Shakspeare, but the
sonnet itself, with an absurd question, "What has truth or nature to do
with sonnets?" The secret history of this unwarrantable mutilation of a
great author by his editor was, as I was informed by the late Mr.
Boswell, merely done to spite his rival commentator Malone, who had
taken extraordinary pains in their elucidation. Steevens himself had
formerly reprinted them, but when Malone from these sonnets claimed for
himself one ivy leaf of a commentator's pride, behold, Steevens in a
rage would annihilate even Shakspeare himself, that he might gain a
triumph over Malone! In the same spirit, but with more caustic
pleasantry, he opened a controversy with Malone respecting Shakspeare's
wife! It seems that the poet had forgotten to mention his wife in his
copious will; and his recollection of Mrs. Shakspeare seems to mark the
slightness of his regard, for he only introduced by an interlineation, a
legacy to her of his "second best bed with the furniture"--and nothing
more! Malone naturally inferred that the poet had forgot her, and so
recollected her as more strongly to mark how little he esteemed her. He
had already, as it is vulgarly expressed, "cut her off, not indeed with
a shilling, but with an old bed!"[211] All this seems judicious, till
Steevens asserts the conjugal affection of the bard, tells us, that the
poet having, when in health, provided for her by settlement, or knowing
that her father had already done so (circumstances entirely
conjectural), he bequeathe