PREFACE.
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chapter entitled, "Whether Stage-players ought to be suffered in a Commonwealth!!" which is to the full as liberal in its conclusions.
A late writer[1] has supposed that Thomas Beard
- ↑ See "The Poetical Decameron, by I. P. Collier. Edinburgh, 1820, vol. ii. p. 128.—An advertisement states that these volumes contain "A popular view of that brilliant era of English Poetry, during which Shakspeare, Spenser, Ben Jonson, &c. flourished." It also sets forth that they include the concentrated essence of the Censura, Restituta, &c. "together with much new information, and many valuable notices not hitherto generally known!"—and finally, that "the work resembles in its plan the elegant dialogues of Bishop Hurd!!"
In its plan then be it, certainly not in its spirit; a more undiscriminative, prolix piece of verbosity about antiquarian trifles, quisquiliæ, scarcely could have graced or disgraced the heaviest of those periodicals from which it is compiled. How Mr. Dibdin must chuckle when he glances his eye from the Templar's Decameron to his own brisk publications! However he must not plume himself too much on his fancied superiority. If he has erected an eighth mundane wonder in producing on the supposed arid, jejune subject of Bibliography, two works replete with life, vivacity, and curious anecdote; (the honestly-filled "Bibliomania," and the beautifully-decorated "Decameron") a less Alcidëan task was not achieved by his rival in turning, with magic pen, "the fruitage fair" of poetry into "bitter ashes, which our offended jaws with spattering noise reject."
