emendations are made. Let us examine this claim. Suppose this case. In the first act of Macbeth occurs the following well-known passage, which, though pages of explanatory and emendatory comment have been written upon it, needs no exegesis, and has been made confusing only by the labors of the note-mongers. Its vivid but disjointed imagery, its profound but broken reflections, are apprehended at once by the sympathetic reader of Shakespeare ;-who, be it remembered, completely apprehends much in his author, of which he cannot give a detailed analysis :

"If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: If the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,
With his surcease, success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,-
We'd jump the life to come-But, in these cases,
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor. This even handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips. He's here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,-
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek; hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking off:

And pity like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, hors'd

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent; but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,

And falls on the other-How now? what news?"

Suppose Mr. Collier's corrected folio had given this passage as follows;-the variations from the present received reading being printed in italic letter:

"If it were done!-'Twere well it were done quickly.
But then when 'tis done! —If the assassinator
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With its success, surcease: that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here:
But here upon this bank, and school'd of time,
We'd jump the life to come.-But, in these cases
We still have judgment here: that we but teach
Bloody inductions, which being taught return
To plague the inventor. *

[Read the intervening lines without alteration.]

And new-born pity, naked like a babe

Or Heaven's cherubin hoist,

Upon the coursers of the sightless air,

Shall blow the horrid deed, with strident blast

That everichene intiers shall drown the wind.

I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intenant, but only
Vaulting ambition, which falls on itself,
And overleaps the other."

If for such an emendation Mr. Collier had claimed "a higher authority" than that used by the editors of the first folio, what a shout of scorn and derision would have gone up from the whole world of letters! And yet this preposterous reading of the passage is seriously proposed, and sustained through four octavo pages, by a commentator, Becket, who also proposes some of the very corrections found in Mr. Collier's folio of 1632. Had this reading of the passage in Macbeth been found in that folio, the weight of no name, the plausibility of no reasoning could have persuaded two sane men that the MS. corrections were of the least authority. The admissibility, then, of those corrections, in the utter absence of any evidence which gives

them even traditional authority, depends entirely upon their appositeness. Their authority is to be derived solely from their intrinsic worth. The passage corrected must, in the first place, unquestionably need correction as it stands in the original folio; and, in the next, the correction proposed must be such as to recommend itself implicitly to those who are most familiar with the text of the poet and the literature of his time. This is the only safe rule to adopt with regard to any arbitrary emendations of Shakespeare's text; a rule which Malone thus laid down in one of his controversies with Steevens, upon a passage in the Two Gentlemen of Verona.

'By arbitrary emendations, I mean conjectures made at the will and pleasure of the conjecturer, and without any authority. Such are Rowe's, Pope's, Theobald's, Hanmer's, &c., and my assertion is, that all emendations not authorized by authentic copies, printed or manuscript, stand on the same footing, and are to be judged of by their reasonableness or probability; and therefore, if Sir Thomas Hanmer or Dr. Warburton, had proposed an hundred false conjectural emendations, and two evidently just, I should have admitted these two, and rejected all the rest."-Boswell's Malone, Vol. IV., p. 129.

But this folio of Mr. Collier's is not only without the slightest supporting evidence to give it authority, ex cathedra, but contains within itself the most conclusive proof that it has not the shadow of a claim to any such authority. In examining it, we shall find that the corrector has showed a great, though by no means singular incapacity to appreciate the poetry, the wit, and the dramatic propriety of Shakespeare's writing that some of the most important of his corrections were made with a disregard of the context, and are at variance with it: that a long time had passed between the publication of the volume and the making of the corrections: that the maker of them con

formed to the taste and usages of a period at least half a century subsequent to the date of the production of the Plays that, according to Mr. Collier's own showing, he continually made corrections merely because he did not understand the text as he found it: that the corrector himself blundered, and corrected his own corrections, which could not have been the case if they had been made from "a higher authority:" and that some of those emendations, the peculiar character of which has been regarded by many as convincing proof that they could not have been conjectural, but must have been made in conformity with some authority, have, on the contrary, been suggested as the fruit of mere conjecture or deduction by other recent correctors, some of whom are among the most wrongheaded and ignorant of Shakespeare's many wrongheaded and ignorant commentators.

And first, as to evident miscomprehension of Shakespeare's meaning. In As You Like it, Act III., Sc. 4, is this passage:

"Orlando. Who could be out being before his beloved mistress? Rosalind. Marry, that should you, if I were your mistress, or I should think my honesty ranker than my wit."

It would seem impossible to misunderstand this; and yet the MS. corrector proposes that Rosalind should say,

66

Marry, that should you, if I were your mistress, or I should thank my honesty rather than my wit:"

-a

change which makes absurd nonsense of the passage ; for, in the case supposed by Rosalind, she would have no honesty to thank.

In the first scene of All's Well that Ends Well, poor

Helena, giving language to her hope that the distance between her and Count Bertram might prove no obstacle to her happiness, says,

"The mightiest space in fortune, nature brings
To join like likes, and kiss like native things."

That is, obviously and pertinently,-that the gifts of nature, in which she supposed herself not wanting, are sometimes able to overcome the greatest differences in fortune. But Mr. Collier's folio reads,

"The mightiest space in nature, fortune brings
To join like likes," &c.;

thus making Helena say exactly the reverse of what Shakespeare made her say, and of what she should say. As the alteration is also entirely at variance with the rest of the speech, this blunder must also be regarded as one of those which show misunderstanding or disregard of the

context.

In the chorus of the third Act of Henry V., are the following lines:

"Behold the threaden sails,

Borne with th' invisible and creeping wind,

Draw the huge bottoms through the furrow'd sea;"

the second of which, the corrector would make,

"Blown with th' invisible and creeping wind,"

thus substituting a prosaic statement of a material fact for a poetical and picturesque description of it.

In the first scene of Act IV. of the same play, Henry speaks of

"The wretched slave,

Who, with a body fill'd and vacant mind,

Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread."

This ruthless man would take the very life of the last line, by reading it,

"Gets him to bed cramm'd with distasteful bread."