By Irving Browne.
CURRENT TOPICS. THE ANNUAL DIGESTS. Although in Brobdingnag no law Contained more words than twenty-two. The books which Gulliver there saw Seemed huge as haystacks to his view. They towered some twenty feet in height And were proportionately wide, And he was given of steps a flight To mount and read from side to side. No end nor limit know our laws, The annual digests swell and grow. Expanding swift, without a pause Their huge impending shadows throw. Then on our backs their authors pin, Like burden bound by Pharisee, Or Christian's wallet full of sin, Or Sinbad's Old Man of the Sea. These books portentous threaten soon To make our bored profession sadder, And publishers must grant the boon To give with everyone a ladder.
Furness' Shakespeare. — The Chairman takes it for granted that all intelligent and liberal lawyers love Shakespeare. It is hard to imagine how any cultured man can consent to live without him. There probably are some who don't care for Shakes peare, just as there are some who never have seen a railroad; but they must be just about as scarce. Once in a while the dramatic sense is left out of a man, just as the sense of humor is, and the gravest respectability hardly makes up for either omission. The most eminent living Shakespearean scholar, and the wisest Shakespearean commentator who has ever lived, deserted the arid paths of the law many years ago for this later love, and the world owes him a debt of gratitude for that choice. The most emi nent lawyer who now-a-days breathlessly scours around in search of the " latest case " is not half so important to the happiness of mankind as Horace Howard Furness, of Philadelphia, who has just given
to the literary world his bi-annual contribution in the form of his variorum edition of A Winter's Tale, supplementing Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet. As You Like It, Lear, Midsummer's Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest. This is not one of the most important or pleasing of the great dramas, but the editor has lav ished upon it a wonderful store of learning and acuteness and an astonishing amount of research. From a recent issue of the Philadelphia " Bulletin " the following concerning Dr. Furness and his work is derived : — "Twenty-four years have gone by; two thirds of the plays of Shakespeare are still clue the Lippincott press, but what Dr. Furness has done, even if he should not live to complete his task, has been recognized as a monumental performance. The resources of history, of philology, of mythology, of theology, of the classics, of the literature of almost every civilized country in the past three hundred years, of geography, of the lore of medicine — indeed, of the whole province of knowledge — have been drawn upon by him in his Locust street home, or at Wallingford, with a patience almost incredible in the zeal with which he has examined every word, every syllable, nay, every letter of the text of Shakespeare as under a microscope. "Within that time he has accumulated a Shakespearean library which represents a fortune. It is probably not equalled outside of England, if it is even there, by any private collection. The Doctor has the famous first, sec ond, third and fourth folio editions, the quartos, and prob ably every other edition in two centuries that has the slightest value to a commentator. His storehouse of the literature of the Elizabethan period, of play-books and other dramatic classics is packed with rare old treasures. As an example of his economy of time in producing re sults, he acquired his knowledge of German largely by a habit of committing to memory at least one word before going to bed each night. 1 will venture to say that he has read more on the subject of Shakespeare alone than many a man who passes himself off as a scholar has read on all things. No one indeed can begin to measure the extent of his knowledge, and the capacity behind it for painstaking accuracy. Thus Dr. Kurness has spent days to determine whether a comma had its proper place in the text; he has consulted fifty books simply to ascertain and correct an error in spelling; he has bestowed as much time on looking into the vexed problem as to what the misprint of ' Villorxa ' in Timon of Athens stands for as many an author would give to writing a book, and the study, for example, which he 357
