been previously rejected by other dissentients. Boswell however on one or two occasions privately to our Critic, pointed at Steevens and Sir Joseph Bankes as sometimes showing their distaste in this manner.
The diligence of Malone had not ceased with the publication of Shakspeare. Time added daily to his stores relative to the Poet, the stage, the language, and allusions of former days, as illustrative of the text. He had become also fully alive to the mechanical defects of the previous work—small print and a close page. All these imperfections he sought to correct; and ambition even aimed at “royal quartos with engravings,” to which Jephson alludes in the previous letter.
In pursuit of all possible knowledge for this project, his friends at Stratford were not forgotten. To Dr. Davenport he writes in April 1793:—
“For my own part, after having for two years reposed from Shakspearian labours, I am now once more going to resume them, and to put a splendid quarto edition to the press, of which I enclose you the prospectus. This is the occasion of my giving you the present trouble, as the first work I mean to set about is the Life of Shakspeare. For this I have a good many materials already in print, to be woven together into a connected narrative with the addition of some information obtained too late for my octavo edition. Will you allow me once again to resume our Shakspearian disquisition,—‘Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety.’”
To his humble friend Jordan he is equally commu-
