in the shipwreck of Sir George Sommers be considered, it may possibly turn out that they are "the particular and recent event which determined Shakspeare to call his play The tempest," instead of "the great tempest of 1612," which has already been supposed to have suggested its name, and which might have happened after its composition. If this be the fact the play was written between 1609 and 1614 when it was so illiberally and invidiously alluded to in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew-fair.

PRO. Before the time be out? no more.

The spirits or familiars attending on magicians were always impatient of confinement. Thus we are told that the spirit Balkin is wearied if the action wherein he is employed continue longer than an hour; and therefore the magician must be careful to dismiss him. The form of such a dismission may be seen in Scot's Discovery of witchcraft, edit. 1665, folio, p. 228.

Quaint here means brisk, spruce, dexterous. From the French cointe.

SCENE 2. Page 35.

CAL. As wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'd
With raven's feather from unwholsome fen,

Drop on you both! a south-west blow on you,
And blister you all o'er!

The following passage in Batman uppon Bartholome his booke De proprietatibus rerum, 1582, folio, will not only throw considerable light on these lines, but furnish at the same time grounds for a conjecture that Shakspeare was in

* See Malone's Shaksp. vol. i. part i. p. 379.

debted to it, with a slight alteration, for the name of Caliban's

mother Sycorax the witch.

"The raven is called corvus of

CORAX it is said that ravens birdes be fed with deaw of heaven all the time that they have no black feathers by benefite of age." Lib. xii. c. 10. The same author will also account for the choice which is made, in the monster's speech, of the South-west wind. "This Southern wind is hot and moyst. Southern winds corrupt and destroy; they heat and maketh men fall into sicknesse." Lib. xi. c. 3. It will be seen in the course of these notes that Shakspeare was extremely well acquainted with this work; and as it is likely hereafter to form an article in a Shakspearean library, it be worth adding that in a private diary written at the time, the original price of the volume appears to have been eight shillings.

may

Although urchins sometimes means hedge-hogs, it is more probable that in this place they denote fairies or spirits, and that Mr. Malone is right in the explanation which he has given. The present writer's former note must therefore be cancelled, as should, according to his conception, such part of Mr. Steevens's as relates to the hedge-hog. The same term both in the next act, and in the Merry Wives of Windsor, is used in a similar sense.

Mr. Steevens in a note on this word in the last mentioned play has observed that the primitive sense of urchin is a hedgehog, whence it came, says he, to signify any thing dwarfish. There is however good reason for supposing it of Celtic origin. Erch in Welsh, is terrible, and urzen, a superior intelligence. In the Bas Breton language urcha signifies to howl. "Urthinwad Elgin," says Scot in his Discovery of witchcraft, p. 224, edit. 1665, "was a spirit in the days of King Solomon,

came over with Julius Cæsar, and remained many hundred years in Wales, where he got the above name."

The urchin or irchin, in the sense of a hedge-hog, is certainly derived from the Latin ericeus; and whoever is desirous of more information concerning the radical of ericeus may be gratified by consulting Vossius's Etymologicon v. erinaceus. With respect to the application of urchin to any thing dwarfish, for we still say a little urchin, this sense of the word seems to have originated rather from the circumstance of its having once signified a fairy, who is always supposed to be a diminutive being, than from the cause assigned by Mr. Steevens.

It is true that in the ensuing act Caliban speaks of Prospero's spirits as attacking him in the shape of hedge-hogs, for which another reason will be offered presently; and yet the word in question is only one out of many used by Shakspeare, which may be best disposed of by concluding that he designed they should be taken in both or either of their senses.

In a very rare old collection of songs set to music by John Bennett, Edward Piers or Peirce, and Thomas Ravenscroft, composers in the time of Shakspeare, and entitled Hunting, hawking, dauncing, drinking, enamoring, 4to, no date, there are, the fairies dance, the elves dance, and the urchins dance. This is the latter:

"By the moone we sport and play,

With the night begins our day;

As we friske the dew doth fall,
Trip it little urchins all;

Lightly as the little bee,

Two by two, and three by three,

And about goe wee, goe wee."

SCENE 2. Page 40.

CAL. It would control my dam's God Setebos.

In Dr. Farmer's note it should have been added that the passage from Eden's History of travayle was part of Magellan's Voyage; or in Mr. Tollet's, that Magellan was included in Eden's collection.

SCENE 2. Page 42.

ARI. Those are pearls, that were his eyes.

We had already had this image in King Richard the third, where Clarence, describing his dream, says:

The incident of Miranda's surprise at the first sight of Ferdinand, and of her falling in love with him, might have been suggested by some lost translation of the 13th tale in the Cento novelle antiche, and which is in fact the subject of father Philip's geese, so admirably told by Boccaccio and Lafontaine. It seems to have been originally taken from the life of Saint Barlaam in The golden legend.

ACT II.

SCENE 1. Page 54.

GON. How lush and lusty the grass looks!

Lush, as Mr. Malone observes, has not yet been rightly interpreted. It is, after all, an old word synonymous with loose. In the Promptuarium parvulorum 1516, 4to, we find "lushe or slacke, laxus." The quotation from Golding, who renders turget by this word, confirms the foregoing definition, and demonstrates that as applied to grass, it means loose or swollen, thereby expressing the state of that vegetable when, the fibres being relaxed, it expands to its fullest growth.

SCENE 2. Page 76.

CAL. Sometime like apes, that moe and chatter at me

And after bite me; then like hedge-hogs, which

Lie tumbling in my barefoot way

Shakspeare, who seems to have been well acquainted with

Bishop Harsnet's Declaration of Popish impostures, has here recollected that part of the work where the author, speaking of the supposed possession of young girls, says, "they make anticke faces, girn, mow and mop like an ape, tumble like a hedge-hogge, &c." Another reason for the introduction of urchins or hedge-hogs into this speech is, that on the first discovery of the Bermudas, which, as has been already stated, gave rise in part to this play, they were supposed to be "haunted as all men know with hogs and hobgoblings." See Dekkar's Strange horserace, &c. sign. f. 3. b. and Mr. Steevens's note in p. 28.

SCENE 2. Page 77.

TRIN. A strange fish! Were I in England now (as once I was) and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver: there would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.

This speech happily ridicules the mania that appears to have always existed among our countrymen for beholding strange sights, however trifling. A contemporary writer and professor of divinity has been no less severe. Speaking of the crocodile, he says, "Of late years there hath been brought into England, the cases or skinnes of such crocodiles to be seene, and much money given for the sight thereof; the policy of strangers laugh at our folly, either that we are too wealthy, or else that we know not how to bestow our money." Batman uppon Bartholome, fo. 359 b.

SCENE 2. Page 82.

STE. This mooncalf.

The best account of this fabulous substance may be found in Drayton's poem with that title.

SCENE 2. Page 83.

STE. I was the man in the moon.

This is a very old superstition founded, as Mr. Ritson has