"
STEEVENS.
[8] This opinion is controverted, and its effects deplored, by Dr. J.
Warton, in a note to Malone's Shakespeare, i. p. 71.--Ed.
[9] Dr. Drake conceives that Dr. Wolcot was indebted to the above noble
passage for the _prima stamina_ of the following stanza:
Thus, while I wond'ring pause o'er Shakespeare's page
I mark, in visions of delight, the sage
High o'er the wrecks of man who stands sublime,
A column in the melancholy waste,
(Its cities humbled, and its glories past,)
Majestic 'mid the solitude of time.--Ed.
[10] The poets and painters before and of Shakespeare's time were all
guilty of the same fault. The former "combined the Gothic mythology
of fairies" with the fables and traditions of Greek and Roman lore;
while the latter dressed out the heroes of antiquity in the arms
and costume of their own day. The grand front of Rouen cathedral
affords ample and curious illustration of what we state. Mr.
Steevens, in his Shakespeare, adds, "that in Arthur Hall's version
of the fourth Iliad, Juno says to Jupiter:
"The time will come that _Totnam French_ shall turn."
And in the tenth Book we hear of "The Bastile": "Lemster wool," and
"The Byble."
[11] The relaxations of "England's queen" with her maids of honour were
not, if we may credit the existing memoirs of her court, precisely
such as modern fastidiousness would assign to the "fair vestal
throned by the west.
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