The two first folio editions are in great request among book-collectors, and, owing to their scarcity, fetch high prices at auctions. They have nothing to recommend them either as to accuracy or elegance of typography, but are really valuable for the various readings which they contain. The best modern editions are those of Johnson and Steevens, and Malone. The last edition is the posthumous one of Malone, edited by Boswell, and little room is left for any farther elucidation of our great dramatist, as far as verbal criticism is concerned. But for the higher branches of criticism, the works of such a poet are as inexhaustible as those of Homer; and if his fame be equally immortal, its fate is more singular. However ardent may be the admiration of Homer on the part of modern scholars, and however profound their investigation of his merits, far from pretending to discoveries unknown to the Grecian critics and philosophers, they support their own views by constant references to the ancients; but Shakspeare has found his most elaborate, and with certain drawbacks, his best critics, among foreigners. In England Shakspeare is the idol of those who read either for the amusement of the imagination, or as students not of poetical or metaphysical, but of every-day nature; and his English editors have rather criticised down to the level of such readers, than aimed at ripening their taste, or elevating their conceptions. We find eminent men among them, such as Pope, Warburton, and Johnson, yet none well qualified to perform the highest functions of a commentator. Johnson’s Preface is highly valued for the justness of his general criticism, and his vindication of the poet on the score of the unities is triumphantly conclusive. But his remarks at the end of each play are so jejune and superficial, that short as they are, no reader perhaps ever wished them longer. One cannot help wondering that the acute, and in many instances profound, though sometimes partial, critic of Cowley, Milton, Dryden, Pope and Gray, should have skimmed so lightly over the surface of Shakspeare. Not so his German translators and critics. No sooner did the Germans take up the study of English literature, than they selected Shakspeare on whom to try their powers; and they are thought to have dived deeper into his mind than have his own countrymen, with their apparently better opportunities. Nor is this wonderful: for they have regarded the poet not merely as the minister of amusement to an admiring audience, but as a metaphysical philosopher of nature’s forming, possessed of deepest insight into the complex motives which move the hearts, and stimulate the actions of mankind. And seeking with a reverent attention to trace the workings of the _maker’s_ mind (for in this instance there is a peculiar propriety in translating the Greek word _poet_) they have succeeded in furnishing profound and satisfactory explanations of much that less intellectual critics had treated as