"The process of purification has been rendered much more laborious, and therefore much more necessary, by the mode in which it was for a long time customary to edit the poet's works. This mode is well exemplified in the case of Malone and Steevens, who, carrying on their editorial labors simultaneously, seem to have vied with each other which should most enrich his edition with textual emendations. Both of them had been very good editors, but for the unwarrantable liberty which they not only took, but gloried in taking, with the text of their author; and, even as it was, they undoubtedly rendered much valuable service. And the same work, though not always in so great a degree, has been carried on by many others: sometimes the alleged corrections of several editors have been brought together, that the various advantages of them all might be combined and presented in one. Thus corruptions of the text have accumulated, each successive editor adding his own to those of his predecessors. Many of these so-called improvements were thrown out by the editor of the Chiswick edition; but no decisive steps in the way of a return to the original text were taken till within a very limited period. Knight, Collier, Verplanck, and Halliwell, to all of whom this edition is under great obligations, have pretty effectually put a stop to the old mode of Shaksperian editing; nor is there much reason to apprehend that any one will at present venture upon a revival of it.
"Of the editions hitherto published in America, Mr. Verplanck's is the only one, so far as we know, that is at all free from the accumulated emendations of preceding editors. Adopting, in the main, the text of Mr. Collier, he brought to the work, however, his own excellent taste and judgment, wherein he as far surpasses the English editor as he necessarily falls short of him in such external advantages as the libraries, public and private, of England alone can supply. And Mr. Collier's text is indeed remarkably pure: nor, perhaps, can any other man of modern times be named, to whom Shaksperian literature is, on the whole, so largely indebted. How much he has done, need not be dwelt upon here, as the results thereof will be found scattered all through this edition. Yet it seems not a little questionable whether both he and Knight have not fallen into a serious error; though it must be confessed that such error, if it be one, is on the right side, inasmuch as their fidelity to the original text extends to the adopting, sometimes of probable, sometimes of palpable, or nearly palpable misprints. In these Mr. Verplanck has judiciously deviated from his English model, and his fine judgment appears to equal advantage in what he adopts and in what he rejects. Of his critical remarks it is enough at present to express the belief, that in this department he has no rival in this country, and will not soon be beaten. Further acknowledgments, both to him and to the other three editors named, will be duly and cheerfully made, as the occasions for them shall arise....
"In the Introductions our leading purpose is to gather up all the historical information that has yet been made accessible, concerning the times when the several plays were written and first acted, and the sources whence the plots and materials of them were taken. It will be seen that in the history of the poet's plays, the indefatigable labors of Mr. Collier and others, often resulting in important discoveries, have wrought changes amounting almost to a total revolution, since the Chiswick edition was published. And we dwell the more upon what Shakspeare seems to have taken from preceding writers, because it exhibits him, where we like most to consider him, as holding his unrivalled inventive powers subordinate to the higher principles of art. Besides, if Shakspeare be the most original of writers, he is also one of the greatest of borrowers; and as few authors have appropriated so freely from others, so none can better afford to have his obligations in this kind made known."
THE STONES OF VENICERELIGION, GLORY, AND ART
Mr. John Ruskin, the "Oxford Student," whose Modern Painters and Seven Lamps of Architecture have made for him the best fame in the literature of art, has just completed the most remarkable of his works, The Stones of Venice, and from advance sheets of it (for which we are indebted to Mr. John Wiley, his American publisher), we present some of his preliminary and more general observations, indicating his great argument that the decline of the political prosperity of Venice was coincident with that of her domestic and individual religion. Popular as the previous works of Mr. Ruskin have been, we cannot doubt that this splendid performance will be the most read and most admired of all.
"Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction. The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded for us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the Prophets of Israel against the cities of the stranger. But we read them as a lovely song; and close our ears to the sternness of their warning: for the very depth of the Fall of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and the sea, that they were once 'as in Eden, the garden of God.' Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weakso quiet,so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow. I would endeavor to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like passing bells, against the Stones of Venice.
"It would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons which might be derived from a faithful study of the history of this strange and mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labor of countless chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline,barred with brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean, where the surf and the sandbank are mingled with the sky. The inquiries in which we have to engage will hardly render this outline clearer, but their results will, in some degree, alter its aspect; and, so far as they bear upon it at all, they possess an interest of a far higher kind than that usually belonging to architectural investigations. I may, perhaps, in the outset, and in few words, enable the general reader to form a clearer idea of the importance of every existing expression of Venetian character through Venetian art and of the breadth of interest which the true history of Venice embraces, than he is likely to have gleaned from the current fables of her mystery or magnificence.
"Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: she was so during a period less than the half of her existence, and that including the days of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing severe examination, whether that decline was owing in any wise to the change in the form of her government, or altogether, as assuredly in great part, to changes in the character of the persons of whom it was composed. The state of Venice existed Thirteen Hundred and Seventy-six years, from the first establishment of a consular government on the island of the Rialto, to the moment when the General-in-chief of the French army of Italy pronounced the Venetian republic a thing of the past. Of this period, Two Hundred and Seventy-six years were passed in a nominal subjection to the cities of old Venetia, especially to Padua, and in an agitated form of democracy, of which the executive appears to have been intrusted to tribunes, chosen, one by the inhabitants of each of the principal islands. For six hundred years, during which the power of Venice was continually on the increase, her government was an elective monarchy, her King or doge possessing, in early times at least, as much independent authority as any other European sovereign, but an authority gradually subjected to limitation, and shortened almost daily of its prerogatives, while it increased in a spectral and incapable magnificence. The final government of the nobles, under the image of a king, lasted for five hundred years, during which Venice reaped the fruits of her former energies, consumed them,and expired.
"Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: she was so during a period less than the half of her existence, and that including the days of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing severe examination, whether that decline was owing in any wise to the change in the form of her government, or altogether, as assuredly in great part, to changes in the character of the persons of whom it was composed. The state of Venice existed Thirteen Hundred and Seventy-six years, from the first establishment of a consular government on the island of the Rialto, to the moment when the General-in-chief of the French army of Italy pronounced the Venetian republic a thing of the past. Of this period, Two Hundred and Seventy-six years were passed in a nominal subjection to the cities of old Venetia, especially to Padua, and in an agitated form of democracy, of which the executive appears to have been intrusted to tribunes, chosen, one by the inhabitants of each of the principal islands. For six hundred years, during which the power of Venice was continually on the increase, her government was an elective monarchy, her King or doge possessing, in early times at least, as much independent authority as any other European sovereign, but an authority gradually subjected to limitation, and shortened almost daily of its prerogatives, while it increased in a spectral and incapable magnificence. The final government of the nobles, under the image of a king, lasted for five hundred years, during which Venice reaped the fruits of her former energies, consumed them,and expired.
"Let the reader therefore conceive the existence of the Venetian state as broadly divided into two periods: the first of nine hundred, the second of five hundred years, the separation being marked by what was called the 'Serrar del Consiglio; that is to say, the final and absolute distinction of the nobles from the commonalty, and the establishment of the government in their hands, to the exclusion alike of the influence of the people on the one side, and the authority of the doge on the other. Then the first period, of nine hundred years, presents us with the most interesting spectable of a people struggling out of anarchy into order and power; and then governed, for the most part, by the worthiest and noblest man whom they could find among them, called their Doge or Leader, with an aristocracy gradually and resolutely forming itself around him, out of which, and at last by which, he was chosen; an aristocracy owing its origin to the accidental numbers, influence, and wealth, of some among the families of the fugitives from the older Venetia, and gradually organizing itself, by its unity and heroism, into a separate body. This first period includes the Rise of Venice, her noblest achievements, and the circumstances which determined her character and position among European powers; and within its range, as might have been anticipated, we find the names of all her hero princes,of Pietro Urseolo, Ordalafo Falier, Domenico Michieli, Sebastiano Ziani, and Enrico Dandolo.
"The second period opens with a hundred and twenty years, the most eventful in the career of Venicethe central struggle of her lifestained with her darkest crime, the murder of Carraradisturbed by her most dangerous internal sedition, the conspiracy of Falieroppressed by her most fatal war, the war of Chiozzaand distinguished by the glory of her two noblest citizens (for in this period the heroism of her citizens replaces that of her monarchs), Vittor Pisani and Carlo Zeno. I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo Zeno, 8th May, 1418; the visible commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children, the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later. The reign of Foscari followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes at Caravaggio. In 1454, Venice, the first of the states of Christendom, humiliated herself to the Turk: in the same year was established the Inquisition of State, and from this period her government takes the perfidious and mysterious form under which it is usually conceived. In 1477, the great Turkish invasion spread terror to the shores of the lagoons; and in 1508, the league of Cambrai marks the period usually assigned as the commencement of the decline of the Venetian power; the commercial prosperity of Venice in the close of the fifteenth century blinding her historians to the previous evidence of the diminution of her internal strength.
"Now there is apparently a significative coincidence between the establishment of the aristocratic and oligarchical powers, and the diminution of the prosperity of the state. But this is the very question at issue; and it appears to me quite undetermined by any historian, or determined by each in accordance with his own prejudices. It is a triple question: first, whether the oligarchy established by the efforts of individual ambition was the cause, in its subsequent operation, of the Fall of Venice; or (secondly) whether the establishment of the oligarchy itself be not the sign and evidence rather than the cause, of national enervation; or (lastly) whether, as I rather think, the history of Venice might not be written almost without reference to the construction of her senate or the prerogatives of her Doge. It is the history of a people eminently at unity in itself, descendants of Roman race, long disciplined by adversity, and compelled by its position either to live nobly or to perish:for a thousand years they fought for life; for three hundred they invited death; their battle was rewarded, and their call was heard.
"Throughout her career, the victories of Venice, and, at many periods of it, her safety, were purchased by individual heroism; and the man who exalted or saved her was sometimes (oftenest) her king, sometimes a noble, sometimes a citizen. To him no matter, nor to her: the real question is, not so much what names they bore, or with what powers they were intrusted, as how they were trained, how they were made masters of themselves, servants of their country, patient of distress, impatient of dishonor; and what was the true reason of the change from the time when she could find saviours among those whom she had cast into prison, to that when the voices of her own children commanded her to sign covenant with Death.
"The evidence which I shall be able to deduce from the arts of Venice will be both frequent and irrefragable, that the decline of political prosperity was exactly coincident with that of domestic and individual religion. I say domestic and individual; forand this is the second point which I wish the reader to keep in mindthe most curious phenomenon in all Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life, and its deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to last, like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only aroused by the touch of a secret spring. That spring was her commercial interest,this the one motive of all her important political acts, or enduring national animosities. She could forgive insults to her honor, but never rivalship in her commerce; she calculated the glory of her conquests by their value, and estimated their justice by their faculty. The fame of success remains, when the motives of attempt are forgotten; and the casual reader of her history may perhaps be surprised to be reminded, that the expedition which was commanded by the noblest of her princes, and whose results added most to her military glory, was one in which while all Europe around her was wasted by the fire of its devotion, she first calculated the highest price she could exact from its piety for the armament she furnished, and then, for the advancement of her own private interests, at once broke her faith and betrayed her religion.