Yet, in spite of the shortcomings of this famous volume, there remains the important consideration, that it contained a certain enduring element in its cast and tone, and that substantially all those books which have poured incessantly from the press since that day follow the same lines and general principle. The older collections are archæological and pre-historic; the precedent _Ana_ and _Facetiæ_ are as saurians to the ordinary reader; and Miller and his humble imitators--the Sheridans, the Footes, and the Sydney Smiths--shut out from observation, so far as the community at large goes, the jocular treasures and triumphs of ante-Millerian Britain. In the last century, among Dr. Johnson and his friends, the Elizabethan and Jacobean literature of all kinds met with limited acceptance and lukewarm admiration; its principal utility and interest were from the point of view of the adapter or plagiarist; and innumerable appeals to public favour presented themselves in forms with which the reader and the buyer had more immediate touch and sympathy. The rarest and most precious editions of Shakespear and other writers of his epoch were to be had for a smaller sum than the _Life of Joe Hains_, the _Jests of Polly Peachum_, or any other fugitive performance damp from the printers. Malone tells us that Dr. Johnson could not admire the Duke of Buckingham’s _Rehearsal_, and thought that “it had not wit enough to keep it sweet, nor sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction”--a truly Johnsonian pleonasm, but also a key to the sentiment of the generation to which Johnson belonged, and of which he was decidedly a more than average representative. But here we have a case where the writer could hardly have been viewed as obsolete or illegible in the same manner and sense as the older playwrights; but Johnson nevertheless--and thousands would have concurred with him--did not relish the humour of a piece produced only some twenty years before he was born. The context and atmosphere were wanting; and if such was the feeling about the _Rehearsal_--of which the merit has recommended it, by-the-bye, to a recent editor--what prospect of survival could exist for the swarm of popular cates with which the English press had teemed from the reign of Henry VIII. to the Revolution? Malone preserves an anecdote which helps to illustrate the difference between the old and modern schools tolerably well: “Mr. Lock, of Norbury Park, well known for his collection of pictures, statues, etc., was a natural son. On his marriage with the daughter of Lady Schaub, who had been very gallant, Horace Walpole said very happily, ‘Then everybody’s daughter is married to nobody’s son.’”