Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/27

 Rh alive so versed in Elizabethan English that it was as the tongue to which he was born, and knowing enough of Hebrew, furnished the translation of the revised text. In the Hebrew lyrics and psalms translated for this edition of the Old Testament he reached the summit of his style, an incomparable mingling of nice scholarship and exalted utterance. How fit it was that the Bible and Shakspere should attract the same critical capacity!

If I were to sum by a single inanimate object the temper and tradition of Dr. Furness, I would turn to the gloves, in his unrivaled collection, which one is glad to believe were Shakspere's. They are manifestly the gloves of an Elizabethan gentleman not too large in build, gold-embroidered, and shapely. They were treasured as genuine by the descendants of Shakspere's son-in-law, the physician who attended him in his last illness, and were handed down in that family. They passed to Garrick, who gave them to Philip Kemble, and so by descent again they passed from Fanny Kemble to their recent owner. There again is the double line of grace, the descent both of line and of genius, to make precious the gloves that rested on Shakspere's hand, took its shape and knew its strength and beauty.