Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/18

 10 sturdy accent fell. Beyond all the other great voices of our tongue, Shakspere was 'gentle.' The author of Coriolanus loathed the general mass. He scarce mentions it without touching on its evil smell. Its sweaty nightcap ever stank in his nostrils. Certain sympathies are needed for full critical appreciation of the poet who was the last word of the feudalism of the past to the democracy of the future, and these sympathies Dr. Furness had.

The Shakspere Society first began his study. For sixty-one years its fortnightly meetings have gathered a group of men foremost in Philadelphia. One has read Shakspere there with a cabinet-minister, a chancellor of the bar association, a judge of the first rank, a great physician as well known in the art of letters as in the letters of his art, and a novelist whose best seller has not had its total exceeded. It was in a like practical atmosphere that, a young man not yet thirty, Dr. Furness was stirred half a century ago to try to compare texts by the aid of a scrapbook. Out of this grew the Variorum, first with the first folio for a basis and later the Cambridge text. He had leisure, a perilous gift. He early collected, until 7000 volumes were at hand in a building for their use; but most collectors are swamped by their apparatus. 'A Concordance of Shaksperian Poems,' 1874, by Mrs. Furness, bespoke a common bond in a perfect union. In 1883 she was taken. After a generation, those