the common cry,—that Shakspeare borrowed his allusions from them. If so, how is it that his expositors, with these old poets before their eyes all this time, together with their own scholarship to boot, have so widely mistaken the true point of his allusion? It is precisely because they have confined their researches to these old poets, and have not followed Shakspeare to the fountain head.

There is a passage in Quintilian which, very probably, has been the common source of both Shakspeare's version, and that of the old poets; with this difference, that he understood the original and they did not.

Quintilian is cautioning against the introduction of solemn bombast in trifling affairs:

"To get up," says he, "this sort of pompous tragedy about mean matters, is as though you would dress up children with the mask and buskins of Hercules."

["Nam in parvis quidem litibus has tragœdias movere tale est quale si personam Herculis et cothurnos aptare infantibus velis."]

Here the addition of the mask proves that the allusion is purely theatrical. The mask and buskins are put for the stage trappings, or properties, of the part of Hercules: of these, one of the items was the lion's skin; and hence the extreme aptitude of the allusion, as applied by the Bastard, in King John, to Austria, who was assuming the importance of Cœur de Lion!

It is interesting to observe how nearly Theobald's plain, homely sense, led him to the necessity of the context. The real points of the allusion can scarcely be expressed in better words than his own:

"Faulconbridge, in his resentment, would say this to Austria, 'That lion's skin which my great father, King Richard, once wore, looks as uncouthly on thy back, as that other noble hide, which was borne by Hercules, would look on the back of an ass!' A double allusion was intended: first, to the fable of the ass in the lion's skin; then Richard I. is finely set in competition with Alcides, as Austria is satirically coupled with the ass."

One step farther, and Theobald would have discovered the true solution: he only required to know that the shoes, by a figure of rhetoric called synecdoche, may stand for the whole character and attributes of Hercules, to have saved himself the trouble of conjecturing an ingenious, though infinitely worse word, as a substitute.

As for subsequent annotators, it must be from the mental preoccupation of this unlucky "ex pede Herculem," that they have so often put their foot in it. They have worked up Alcides' shoe into a sort of antithesis to Cinderella's; and, like Procrustes, they are resolved to stretch everything to fit.

A. E. B.

Leeds.

GÖTHE'S AUTHOR-REMUNERATION.

The Note in your valuable Journal (Vol. vii., p. 591.) requires, I think, so far as it relates to Göthe, several corrections which I am in the position of making. The amount which that great man is said to have received for his "works (aggregate)" is "30,000 crowns." The person who originally printed this statement must have been completely ignorant of Göthe's affairs, and even biography. Göthe had (unlike Byron) several publishers in his younger years. Subsequently he became closer connected with M. J. G. Cotta of Stuttgardt, who, in succession, published almost all Göthe's works. Amongst them were several editions of his complete works: for instance, that published conjointly at Vienna and Stuttgardt. Then came, in 1829, what was called the edition of the last hand (Ausgabe letzter Hand), as Göthe was then more than eighty years of age. During all the time these two editions were published, other detached new works of Göthe were also printed; as well as new editions of former books, &c. Who can now say that it was 20,000 crowns (thalers?) which the great poet received for each various performance?—No one. And this for many reasons. Göthe always remained with M. Cotta on terms of polite acquaintanceship, no more: there was no "My dear Murray" in their strictly business-like connexion. Göthe also never wrote on such things, even in his biography or diary. But some talk was going around in Germany, that for one of the editions of his complete works (there

appeared still many volumes of posthumous), he received the above sum. I can assert on good authority, that Göthe, foreseeing his increasing popularity even long after his death, stipulated with M. Cotta to pay his heirs a certain sum for every new edition of either his complete or single works. One of the recipients of these yet current accounts is Baron Wolfgang von Göthe, Attaché of the Prussian Legation at Rome.

A Foreign Surgeon.

Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury Square.

Minor Notes.

Parallel Passages.—

Uneda.

Unpublished Epitaphs.—I copied the following two epitaphs from monuments in the churchyard of Llangerrig, Montgomeryshire, last autumn. They perhaps deserve printing from the slight resemblance they bear to that in Melrose Churchyard, quoted in Vol. vii., pp. 676, 677.:

P. H. Fisher.

The Colour of Ink in Writings.—My attention was called to this subject some years ago by an attempt made in a judicial proceeding to prove that part of a paper produced was written at a different time than the rest, because part differed from the rest in the shade of the ink. The following conclusions have been the result of my observations upon the subject:

1. That if the ink of part of a writing is of a different shade, though of the same colour, from that of the other parts, we cannot infer from that circumstance alone that the writing was done at different times. Ink taken from the top of an inkstand will be lighter than that from the bottom, where the dregs are; the deeper the pen is dipped into the ink, the darker the writing will be.

2. Writing performed with a pen that has been used before, will be darker than that with a new pen; for the dry residuum of the old ink that is encrusted on the used pen will mix with the new ink, and make it darker. And for the same reason—

3. Writing with a pen previously used will be darker at first than it is after the old deposit, having been mixed up with the new ink, is used up.

M. E.

Philadelphia.

Literary Parallels.—Has it ever been noticed that the well-known epitaph, sometimes assigned to Robin of Doncaster, sometimes to Edward Courtenay, third Earl of Devon, and I believe to others besides: "What I gave, that I have," &c., has been anticipated by, if not imitated from, Martial, book v. epigr. 42., of which the last two lines are: