Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 5.djvu/66

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s. v. MARCH,

taking advantage of favourable winds. A careful examination of all the printed matter relating to it has not disclosed how if in any manner the ship moved. The wheels or rollers under the car or packet boat also do not receive notice ; so, although they are an intelligent suggestion of land- ing wheels, we must suppose they only aided the movement of the ship about the showground.

A long letter of this Count de Lennox, asking for the loan of 200Z., points out that at least 20,000 persons would pay a shilling or more to see it, and the person addressed could have his own representatives at the ticket office to secure the recovery of his proportion of the receipts. The enter- prise was suspect from the first ; thus The Morning Herald (July, 1835) concludes a long note : " We should hope that their argonautics will not end in their obtaining a Golden Fleece without the trouble of sailing."

The airship was removed on a Monday evening early in September to Vaux- hall Gardens, and an illustrated broadside printed and sold by G. Smeeton was re- issued, " Now exhibiting at Vauxhall Gar- dens " being substituted for " Which is shortly to ascend from Kensington." A rumour that it had been destroyed was contradicted, but it was ultimately seized for debt by the Sheriff of Middlesex, and removed in three wagons, a newspaper (the cutting not identified) commenting : " Behold the farce of the bottle conjurer over again."

I have failed to trace the subsequent fate of the Eagle. It was on exhibition at Vauxhall on Sept. 12, when an ascent in twelve days' time, with Count Lennox, his wife, and six other persons, was promised ; but I have been unable to discover anything further. ALECK ABBAHAMS.

SHAKESPEARE, FLETCHER, AND THEOBALD. ,
 * DOUBLE FALSEHOOD ' :

(See ante, p. 30.)

TURNING now to the internal evidence, it is to be said that the determination of the authorship of the play is no easy matter, by reason of the fact that it has been, in the words of the royal licence prefixed to the 1728 edition, " with great labour and pains revised and adapted to the stage " by

Theobald. None of the recognized means can be employed uniformly : the verse's mechanism cannot easily be set down on percentage bases ; its incalculable music has been robbed of much of its individuality ; the dramatic technique and the characteri- zation afford no sound criteria ; and the imagery, the habit of thought, the diction, and the sentence-building of the original writer or writers have been so overlaid that definite results are not to be looked for. There has of recent years been a tendency among University critics who are appar- ently deaf to the differences between the lyrical swing of the verse of Fletcher, the noble march of the verse of Beaumont, the subtle music of the verse of Shakespeare, and the frigid rhetorical cadence of Mas- singer to judge the authorship of Eliza- bethan plays almost entirely by diction ; and to such an absurd length has this been carried that one even objected to my attri- bution of certain short passages of a Shakespearian play to Massinger on the ground that they showed none of his favourite phrases, though, if this view were pressed honestly and consistently to its- logical conclusion, Massinger would be robbed of 25 per cent of his acknowledged work.

The first and best test is that of the ear, for those who have ears ; the secondary tests should be mathematical and mechani- cal, dealing with the mechanism of the sentence and with the mechanism of the verse (though some tests, it is to be noted, are much less valuable than others, since the characteristics they deal with are deliberate and easily imitable, while the characteristics dealt with by other tests are neither the one nor the other) ; and then on the third line comes the diction ; while the technique, the characterization, the imagery,, and the habit of thought must remain very unreliable guides.

Farmer and Dyce considered the play Shirley's ; but I fail to see any reason for such an attribution. Massinger also has been suggested ; but there are not in the whole play half-a-dozen lines that in the very slightest degree remind me of that dramatist. Of those writers with whom the play has never been connected on any grounds (however slight) of external evi- dence, Beaumont is the only one of whom I am sufficiently reminded to warrant any real examination of his claim ; and, when one bears in mind his connexion with Fletcher and the date of the play, one may be justified in adding his name to the names