Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 10.pdf/389

 358

made of the various phases of I.ear's madness is in itself a little treatise on insanity. "Thus while The Winter's Tale has not perhaps drawn around it so large a field of critical literature to explore as its predecessors, I find that Dr. Furness has consulted not fewer than forty editions of the play, printed at various times in the past two hundred and fifty years, for his tex tual notes, and upward of one hundred and ninety bto*s for his direct citations! "Nor must it be inferred from the minuteness and scru pulousness of his commentations that Dr. furness is a pedant and his work dry. On the contrary, no one knows what enjoyment there is in going to the playhouse to see Hamlet, Macbeth, As You Like It, The Tempest and the rest, unless he has conned the notes of the variorum. The lightness of his touch as a wriier is quite as notable as his reaching penetration as an investigator. "Nor are there many writers who can read his lucid, searching English without learning something new in their art. It is simplicity itself, as the best of English always is. But it is as bright as the sunniness of a May afternoon, with something of the sense of a gentle, genial warmth behind it. Easy, unaffected, almost musical at times, it is also in flexibly exact. There are writers among us who would be willing, indeed, to lose at least a finger if they could use the language with his elastic, simple touch. "We have no other intellectual entertainment in Phila delphia such as Dr. Furness presents on those too rare occa sions when he appears upon the platform as a reader, as he used to do on winter afternoons. To hear Furness read a Shakespearean play has been many a time better than to witness it on the stage. "The elocution of no actor has such power to make a scene of a character in Macbeth or the Merchant of Ven ice as vivid as he can make it with his masterful intelli gence, his sympathy and his keen insight into every pos sible phase of meaning in the text. ' I have seen Irving play Hamlet,' said Henry M. Hoyt, who was a good judge of acting, when the Englishman first appeared at the Chest nut Street Opera House in 1883, ' and I have heard Fur ness read it, but Furness gave me a belter idea of Hamlet in a quarter of an hour than Irving did in the whole evening.'" Dr. Furness rests himself by an active member ship in a great many public bodies, and as he differs from Colonel Ingersoll in not worshipping Shakes peare as his only god, he is at present engaged in furnishing metrical texts of Isaiah and the Psalms for the Polychrome Bible. May his life and powers be spared to complete his undertaking! If he shall be spared to the age of his eminent father, the aspira tion will be granted, and the world will not demand nor need another edition of Shakespeare for a century, if ever. We hope that he will at least make us sure of Falstaff and give us Henry Fourth at an early day. One of the dearest privi leges of the writer's life was to see Falstaff enacted by Hackett, and he thirsts to reach Furness' com mentary on the " dear old rascal," as he has called him.

Big Books. — The Chairman has often conjec tured on the subject of big law books that have out lived their usefulness. They do outlive it; there, is no room for doubt of that proposition. They outlive it in very short order, too; their useful life is less than that of a dog. We are speaking now with special reference to those portentous tomes that are issued once a year under the designation of digest. A recent event in Congress has afforded to us a hint of an excellent purpose to which they may be put. Two Congressmen differing in opinion, one of them endeavored to enforce his argument and inject it into the skull of his antagonist, by hurling at him a volume of the "Congressional Record." This is a huge book, heavy by means of its size, and heavier still by reason of its contents. Probably it would have proved fatal had it arrived at its destination; at all events, it would, in prize-fighting parlance, have "put to sleep" the object of its career if it had landed on his active jaw. If fatal, it would have proved a humiliating death, but still quite appro priate. Those Congressmen, many of them, make their constituents and their countrymen generally so tired that it would be an act of poetic justice to have one occasionally put out of the world or temporarily silenced by means of the record of their babble. It immediately occurred to us that it would be a wise measure to invite these orators to enlist in the war, to put them in the van, to arm them with the " Con gressional Record," and to " sick " them on the dastard foe. We do not believe the Spaniards would stay a moment if they saw the air full of those records and had the smallest idea of its contents. They would not stand upon the order of their going, but go in disorder. But their ignorance would be bliss for all parties. Porthos, Dumas' giant musketeer, bequeathed his library of six thousand volumes, "quite new and never opened," to his young friend, Bragelonne. A poet has conjectured that his books were proportioned to his size, and observed : — "What missiles fraught with fatal harm, In case of siege of his chateau, Propelled by his balistic arm, Upon the aggregated foe!" Even if the result should not answer our expectation, some good would ensue; the soil of our favored land would groan less under the burden of those wearisome speeches, and if their throwers should not return from the stricken field, we should endure the tidings of their fate with a grief as chastened as that which moved the bosom of Mark Twain when he wept over the grave of Adam. Trains of ammunition should follow the army, laden with all the American and General Digests more than three years old, and if the war should be prolonged, and call for stringent