Page:Life of Edmond Malone.djvu/189

Rh The adoption of the particular paper and type were the results of ill advice; for his great labours were gratuitous. They taxed not only the eyes of others but his own, the object being to accommodate the masses, who sought the greatest quantity of matter within the most moderate compass. Taste was thus sacrificed to partial convenience. “His sight,” said Boaden, “had never been very good; and unfortunately to keep the works of Shakspeare within any reasonable limits, he had in the year 1790 done the greatest possible injury to his eyes by selecting types both for text and notes for his edition painful and distressing to the great majority of readers.”

The letter of approval by Burke is too characteristic of the master not to find place here:

(No date.) ,—Upon coming to my new habitation in town, I found your valuable work upon my table. I take it as a very good earnest of the instruction and pleasure which may be yet reserved for my declining years. Though I have had many little arrangements to make both of a public and private nature, my occupations were not able to overrule my curiosity, nor to prevent me from going through almost the whole of your able, exact, and interesting history of the stage.

A history of the stage is no trivial thing to those who wish to study human nature in all shapes and positions. It is of all things the most instructive to see not only the reflection of manners and characters at several periods, but the modes of making their reflection, and the manner of adapting it at those periods to the taste and disposition of mankind. The stage indeed may be considered as the republic of active literature, and its history as the history of that state. The great events of political history when not combined with the