BY JOSEPH HUNTER,

A FELLOW OF THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES, AND AN ASSISTANT KEEPER

OF THE PUBLIC RECORDS.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

The West yet glimmers with some streaks of day.-MACBETH, Act III. Sc. 3.

VOLUME THE FIRST.

LONDON:

PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY J. B. NICHOLS AND SON,

25, PARLIAMENT STREET.

PREFACE.

THERE is no English author on whom so much editorial labour has been bestowed as on Shakespeare. The reason is plain. No author has deserved it better or requires it more. We may perhaps be a little extravagant in our admiration of him. It seems to many as if it were a duty they owed to their country to assert his unimpeachable excellence. This may be to form too high an estimate of him; but, when every deduction is made on account of his unfiled expressions, his occasional offences against decorum, dramatic or moral, and other faults, which every one who would have his admiration sympathized in by the reflecting part of the community must allow to exist, he will still appear high in the first rank of those of all ages and nations who have instructed and delighted mankind, and whose high thoughts embodied in harmonious numbers are to go down to the latest posterity, a bright and beautiful inheritance which the Sons of Song have bequeathed to us.

As he eminently deserves that no pains shall be spared to make his sense and meaning fully apprehended, so does he also most eminently require that there should step in between the books in which his contemporaries exhibited to the world what he had written, and those who are to peruse them,