ANOTHER SHAKESPEARIAN PHRASE.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:]
SIs,—The letters you have printed upon the "translation "of Bottom recall to me a curious experience. Some years ago, my wife and I were walking from the pretty village of Sleights towards Whitby, when at the roadside we saw an old man sitting on the grass by a heap of rough pegs, the points of which he was employed in sharpening with a clasp-knife. We stopped to talk with him, wheti he told us that he bought the skewers "rough-hewn," and was "shaping their ends "! We stared at him for a noment, half-thinking the old fellow must be making a quotation, but he was clearly only using the terms of his trade.
We walked away, wondering whether here was a mere coincidence, or whether, when Shakespeare said,—
" There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will," he had in his mind such a simple occupation as this.
I have to-day found in a note, that Dr. Farmer had a similar experience to ours, which he told to Steevens, who, remem- bering that Shakespeare's father was said (among other things) to have been a wool-stapler, and that wool-packs are some- times pinned up with skewers, inclined to believe that Shakespeare as a youth had seen the process of end-shaping going on, and in this passage was using words once technically
familiar to him.—I am, Sir, &c., W. T. MALLEsozs.
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