[Footnote 16:  The English work with which foreigners of every country are perhaps best acquainted is Hume’s History; and there we have a most unjustifiable account both of Shakespeare and his age.  “Born in a rude age, and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction either from the world or from books.”  How could a man of Hume’s acuteness suppose for a moment that a poet, whose characters display such an intimate acquaintance with life, who, as an actor and manager of a theatre, must have come in contact with all descriptions of individuals, had no instruction from the world?  But this is not the worst; he goes even so far as to say, “a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold.”  This is nearly as offensive as Voltaire’s “drunken savage.”—­TRANS.]

[Footnote 17:  In my lectures on The Spirit of the Age.]

[Footnote 18:  In one of his sonnets he says: 

  O, for my sake do you with fortune chide
    The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds,
  That did not better for my life provide
    Than public means which public manners breeds.

And in the following: 

  Your love and pity doth the impression fill,
    which vulgar scandal stamp’d upon my brow.]

[Footnote 19: 

  And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
  That so did take Eliza and our James!]

[Footnote 20:  This is perhaps not uncommon still in some countries.  The Venetian Director Medebach, for whose company many of Goldoni’s Comedies were composed, claimed an exclusive right to them.—­TRANS.]

[Footnote 21:  Twelfth Night, or What You Will—­Act iii., scene 2.]

[Footnote 22:  As You Like It.]

[Footnote 23:  In one of the commendatory poems in the first folio edition: 

  And on the stage at half sword parley were
  Brutus and Cassius.]

[Footnote 24:  In the first volume of Charakteristiken und Kritiken, published by my brother and myself.]

[Footnote 25:  A contemporary of the poet, the author of the already-noticed poem, (subscribed I.M.S.), tenderly felt this when he said: 

  Yet so to temper passion that our ears
  Take pleasure in their pain, and eyes in tears
  Both smile and weep.]

[Footnote 26:  In Hamlet’s directions to the players.  Act iii., scene 2.]

[Footnote 27:  See Hamlet’s praise of Yorick.  In Twelfth Night, Viola says: 

  This fellow is wise enough to play the fool,
  And to do that well craves a kind of wit;
  He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
  The quality of the persons, and the time;
  And like the haggard, check at every feather
  That comes before his eye.  This is a practice
  As full of labor as a wise man’s art: 
  For folly that he wisely shows is fit,
  But wise men’s folly fall’n quite taints their wit.—­AUTHOR.