MR COLLIER'S INTRODUCTION. 15
Tale/' or he would probably have followed Greene's description, which is certainly one of the prettiest and most natural portions of his narrative. Shakespeare, also, without any very apparent reason, reverses the scene: his play opens in Sicily, and Perdita is exposed on the coast of Bohemia; while Greene's novel begins in Bohemia, and Fawnia is found by the old Shepherd on the coast of Sicily. Bohemia is, however, over and over again spoken of by Greene as a maritime country, and Shakespeare, supposing he knew better, did not think it worth while to disturb the popular notion. We have the evidence of Taylor, the water-poet, in his "Travels to Prague," that in 1620 it was not considered a piece of very unusual ignorance in an Alderman of London not to be aware that "a fleet of ships" could not arrive at a port of Bohemia. <
" Pandosto " appears to have be'en extraordinarily popular, and Mr Dyce enumerates twelve editions : to these at least two others are to be added, with which he was not acquainted, viz. in 1609 and 1632. No doubt several more have been lost, as we do not find it to have been reprinted between 1588 and 1607, a period during which it would probably have been most attractive. The only known copy of the edition of 1588 is in the British Museum ; but it is defective in one place, and we have necessarily been compelled to complete our impression from a later copy. Whether the story were the invention of Greene, or whether, as was not unusual with him, he adopted it from a foreign language, cannot now be ascertained -, but it is not known abroad in any other form than that in which it has been received from this country.
It will not be out of place to take some notice here of a production, which is asserted by the bookseller to have come from the pen of this prolific author; but at all events he could have had nothing to do