blance to it in form, but none in signification; in other cases, what is indispensable to the sense, or to the continuity and completeness of the dramatic narrative, is altogether omitted. Such errors and deficiencies can only be explained on the supposition that the compositor had been left to depend upon a manuscript which was imperfect, or which could not be read. It is remarkable that deformities of this kind are apt to be found accumulated at one place; there are as it were nests or eruptions of them; they run into constellations ; showing that the manuscript had there got torn or soiled, and that the printer had been obliged to supply what was wanting in the best way that he could by his own invention or conjectural ingenuity.* Of the other Folio Editions, the Second, dated 1632, is the only one the new readings introduced in which have ever been regarded as of any authority. But nothing is known of the source from which they may have been derived. The prevailing opinion has been that they are nothing more than the conjectural emendations of the unknown editor. Some of them, * I have discussed the question of the reliance to be placed on the First Folio at greater length in an article on The Text of Shakespeare in the 40th No. of the North British Review (for February 1854). It is there shown, from an examination of the First Act of Macbeth, that the number of readings in the First Folio (including arrangements of the verse and punctuations affecting the sense) which must be admitted to be either clearly wrong or in the highest degree suspicious probably amounts to not less than twenty on an average per page, or about twenty thousand in the whole volume. Most of them have been given up and abandoned even by those of the modern editors who profess the most absolute deference to the general authority of the text in which they are found. nevertheless, have been adopted in every subsequent reprint. The manuscript of Henry the Fourth (belonging to Sir Edward Dering, Bart., of Surrenden in Kent), is curious and interesting, as being certainly either of Shakespeare's own age or close upon it, and as the only known manuscript copy of any of the Plays of nearly that antiquity. But it appears to have been merely transcribed from the common printed text, with such omissions and modifications as were deemed expedient in reducing the two Plays to one. The First Part of Henry the Fourth had been printed no fewer than five times, and the Second Part also once, in the lifetime of the author. The Dering MS., however, exhibits a few peculiar readings. Like nearly every modern editor, the person by whom it was prepared, had felt dissatisfied with the word entrance in the speech by the King with which the First Part opens : “No more the thirsty entrance of this soil and for entrance he has substituted bosome. Those who stand up for or accept the old reading explain the entrance of the soil as meaning the mouth of the soil. That is apparently a notion suggested by the lips in the next line. The her lips, however, and the her own children must of course be the lips and the children of the soil. Steevens, indeed, conceives that by her lips Shakespeare may mean the lips of peace mentioned four lines before ; but such an interpretation, which, independently of other objections, would give the her of “ her lips” one reference and the her of " her own children" another, is hardly deserving of notice. Well, then, we have the mouth of the soil daubing the lips of the soil,—which is plainly nonsense. Nor can anything better be made of entrants (as conjectured by Steevens), or entrails (as proposed by Douce). Erinnys, suggested by Mason, would give us a very good sense; the Spirit of Discord presiding over the soil might very well be said to daub with blood the lips of the soil; and the circumstance of the word being a Shakespearian άπαξ λεγόμενον, or not elsewhere found, would make it more likely to have been mistaken by the printer. But I should be rather inclined to suspect the true reading to be “the thirsty Genius of this soil.” The Genius is a familiar and favourite expression with Shakespeare. The word would probably be written with a capital initial; and in one form of our old handwriting the G and E very much resembled each other, as they still do in the German printed character. On this outside page of the manuscript put into the hands of the printer the body of the word might be nearly rubbed out and invisible. Five lines before, in the first line of the speech, it is doubtful whether we ought to read “wan with care" worn with care;" the latter is the correction of Mr. Collier's MS. annotator, and certainly it would seem to be more natural for the King to speak of his anxieties as wearing him down and wasting him away than as merely blanching his complexion. This outside leaf of the manuscript was evidently in a somewhat dilapidated state. It is only upon this supposition of the old text of the Plays having been printed from a partially obliterated or otherwise imperfectly legible manuscript, or which, as we see, meets and accounts for other facts and peculiar appearances, while it is also so probable in itself, that the remarkable collection of emendations in Mr. Collier's copy of the Second Folio can, apparently, be satisfactorily explained. The volume came into Mr. Collier's hands in 1849, and was some time afterwards discovered by him to contain a vast number of alterations of the printed text inserted by the pen, in a handwriting certainly of the seventeenth century, and possibly of not much later date than the volume. They extend over all the thirty-six Plays, and are calculated to amount in all to at least 20,000. Here is, then, a most elaborate revision-an expenditure of time and painstaking which surely could only have been prompted and sustained by a strong feeling in the annotator of admiration for his author, and the most anxious and scrupulous regard for the integrity of his text. Such motives would be very inconsistent with the substitution generally for the old words of anything that might merely strike him as being possibly a preferable reading. The much more probable presumption is that he followed some guide. Such a labour is only to be naturally accounted for by regarding it as that of the possessor of a valued but very inaccurately printed book who had obtained the means of collating it with and correcting it by a trustworthy manuscript. And, when we come to examine the new readings, we find everything in sufficient correspondence with this hypothesis; some things almost, we may say, demonstrating it. Some of the alterations are of a kind altogether transcending the compass of conjectural emendation, unless it had taken the character of pure invention and fabrication. Such in particular are the entire lines inserted in various passages of which we have not a trace in the printed text. The number, too, of the new readings which cannot but be allowed to be either indisputable, or, at the least, in the highest degree ingenious and plausible, is of itself almost conclusive against our attributing them to nothing better than conjecture. Upon this supposition this unknown annotator would have outdone all that has been accomplished in the way of brilliant and felicitous conjecture by all other labourers upon the Shakespearian text taken together. On the other hand, some of his alterations are in all probability mistaken, some of his new readings apparently inadmissible;* and many passages which there can hardly be a doubt are corrupt are passed over by him without correction. All this becomes intelligible upon our hypothesis. Working possibly upon the same manuscripts (whether those of the author or no) from * Among such must be reckoned undoubtedly the alteration in Lady Macbeth's passionate rejoinder (Macbeth, i. 7), “What beast was't, then, That made you break this enterprise to me?”— of beast into boast. This is to convert the forcible and characteristic not merely into tameness but into no-meaning; for there is no possible sense of the word boast which will answer here. But in this case the corrector was probably left to mere conjecture in making his selection between the two words ; for in the handwriting of the earlier part of the seventeenth century the e and o are frequently absolutely undistinguishable. In the specimen of the annotator's own handwriting which Mr. Collier gives the two e's of the word briefely are as like o's as e's, and what Mr. Collier reads bleeding might be equally read blooding, if that were a word. There cannot, I conceive, be a question that a celebrated pas |