LORD ARTHUR, was the son of Sir Henry Capel. In 1640 he was chosen to represent the county of Hereford, and sat as a member of the Long Parliament, which was convened that year. He was elevated to the peerage by Charles I.; and on the breaking out of the revolution he raised and maintained a troop in the royal interest till the final triumph of the Parliamentarians compelled him to make peace with them. He then retired to his private residence at Hadham. On reassembling his troop, in order to effect the rescue of Charles, he was forced to surrender at Colchester to General Fairfax, and was condemned by the Commons to be banished; but on the authority of some of the parliamentary leaders he was immediately committed to the Tower. He contrived to effect his escape from prison, but was apprehended at Lambeth, and again committed to stand his trial at Westminster for treason. He was condemned to death, and executed on the 9th of March 1649, exhibiting on the scaffold the greatest calmness and dignity. While in the Tower he wrote several stanzas, which were afterwards published. He was the author of Daily Observations or Meditations, divine, moral, and political, written by a person of honour and piety; to which are added, Certain Letters written to several persons, a posthumous publication, which was afterwards reprinted under a different title, with an account of his life.

CAPELLI, EDWARD, the well-known critic and annotator of Shakspeare, was born at Troston in Suffolk in 1713. Through the influence of the Duke of Grafton, he was early appointed to the office of deputy-inspector of plays, with a salary of £200 per annum. Shocked at the inaccuracies which had crept into Sir Thomas Hanmer's edition of Shakspeare, he projected an entirely new edition, to be carefully collated with the original copies. After spending three years in collecting and comparing a vast number of scarce folio and quarto editions, he published his own edition in 10 vols. 8vo, with an introduction, which was written in a style of extraordinary and romantic quaintness, and which was afterwards appended to the prolegomena of Johnson's and Steevens's editions. The work was published at the expense of the principal booksellers of London, who gave him £300 for his labour. Three other volumes of Notes and various readings of Shakspeare, which he had announced in his introduction, under the title of The School of Shakspeare, were published under the editorial superintendence of Mr Collins, in 1783, two years after Capell's death. They contain the results of his unremitting labour for thirty years in collating the ancient MSS., and throw considerable light on the history of the times of Shakspeare, as well as on the sources from which he derived his plots. Besides the works already specified, he published a volume of ancient poems called Profluions, and an edition of Antony and Cleopatra adapted for the stage.