the matters on which it seems to them severally that they have cause to complain of imperfection or inaccuracy in his conscientious and painstaking report.  Anxious above all things to secure for himself such credit as may be due to the modest merit of scrupulous fidelity, he desires to lay before the public so much of the corrections conveyed in their respective letters of reclamation as may be necessary to complete or to rectify the first draught of their propositions as conveyed in his former summary.  On the present occasion, however, he must confine himself to forwarding the rectifications supplied by two of the members who took a leading part in the debate of April 1st.

The necessarily condensed report of Mr. A.’s paper on A Midsummer Night’s Dream may make the reasoning put forward by that gentleman liable to the misconception of a hasty reader.  The omission of various qualifying phrases has left his argument without such explanation, his statements without such reservation, as he had been careful to supply.  He did not say in so many words that he had been disposed to assign this drama to the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy simply on the score of the affinity discernible between the subjects of the two plays.  He is not prone to self-confidence or to indulgence in paradox.  What he did say was undeniable by any but those who trusted only to their ear, and refused to correct the conclusions thus arrived at by the help of other organs which God had given them—­their fingers, for example, and their toes; by means of which a critic of trained and competent scholarship might with the utmost confidence count up as far as twenty, to the great profit of all students who were willing to accept his guidance and be bound by his decision on matters of art and poetry.  Only the most purblind could fail to observe, what only the most perverse could hesitate to admit, that there was at first sight an obvious connection between the poison-flower—­“purple from love’s wound”—­squeezed by Oberon into the eyes of the sleeping Titania and the poison rubbed by Vindice upon the skull of the murdered Gloriana.  No student of Ulrici’s invaluable work would think this a far-fetched reference.  That eminent critic had verified the meaning and detected the allusion underlying many a passage of Shakespeare in which the connection of moral idea was more difficult to establish than this.  In the fifth act of either play there was a masque or dramatic show of a sanguinary kind; in the one case the bloodshed was turned to merry-making, in the other the merry-making was turned to bloodshed.  Oberon’s phrase, “till I torment thee for this injury,” might easily be mistaken for a quotation from the part of Vindice.  This explanation, he trusted, would suffice to exonerate his original view from any charge of haste or rashness; especially as he had now completely given it up, and adopted one (if possible) more impregnably based on internal and external evidence.