[7] Thus, says Dowries the Prompter, p. 22:  “The tragedy of Romeo and
    Juliet was made some time after [1662] into a tragi-comedy, by Mr.
    James Howard, he preserving Romeo and Juliet alive; so that when the
    tragedy was revived again, ’twas played alternately, tragical one
    day, and tragi-comical another, for several days together.” 
    STEEVENS.

[8] This opinion is controverted, and its effects deplored, by Dr. J.
    Warton, in a note to Malone’s Shakespeare, i. p. 71.—­Ed.

[9] Dr. Drake conceives that Dr. Wolcot was indebted to the above noble
    passage for the prima stamina of the following stanza: 

  Thus, while I wond’ring pause o’er Shakespeare’s page
  I mark, in visions of delight, the sage
    High o’er the wrecks of man who stands sublime,
  A column in the melancholy waste,
  (Its cities humbled, and its glories past,)
    Majestic ’mid the solitude of time.—­Ed.

[10] The poets and painters before and of Shakespeare’s time were all
     guilty of the same fault.  The former “combined the Gothic mythology
     of fairies” with the fables and traditions of Greek and Roman lore;
     while the latter dressed out the heroes of antiquity in the arms
     and costume of their own day.  The grand front of Rouen cathedral
     affords ample and curious illustration of what we state.  Mr.
     Steevens, in his Shakespeare, adds, “that in Arthur Hall’s version
     of the fourth Iliad, Juno says to Jupiter: 

     “The time will come that Totnam French shall turn.”

     And in the tenth Book we hear of “The Bastile”:  “Lemster wool,” and
     “The Byble.”

[11] The relaxations of “England’s queen” with her maids of honour were
     not, if we may credit the existing memoirs of her court, precisely
     such as modern fastidiousness would assign to the “fair vestal
     throned by the west.”

[12] A very full and satisfactory essay on the learning of Shakespeare,
     may be found in Mr. Malone’s Edition of Shakespeare, i. 300.

[13]
     [Greek:  Memonomenos d’ o tlaemon
     Aealin aethelon katheudein.] Anac. 8.

[14] The Comedy of Errors, which has been partly taken by some wretched
     playwright from the Menaechmi of Plautus, is intolerably stupid: 
     that it may occasionally display the touch of Shakespeare, cannot
     be denied; but these purpurei panni are lamentably infrequent;
     and, to adopt the language of Mr. Stevens, “that the entire play
     was no work of his, is an opinion which (as Benedick says) fire
     cannot melt out of me; I will die in it at the stake.”  Dr. Drake’s
     Literary Life of Johnson.—­Ed.

[15] A list of these translations may be seen in Malone’s Shakespeare,
     i. 371.  It was originally drawn up by Mr. Steevens.—­Ed.