not only, like the others, corrected "in an ancient hand," but its numerous emendations being "curious and important, consisting of stage directions, alterations in the punctuation," &c. Did conjectural emendation spring up at once, armed at all points, immediately upon the publication of the third folio? But whether it did or not, the man who made some of the corrections in the Perkins folio did conjecture, and has left irrefragable evidence that he did. In the private fac similes before mentioned, a passage near the end of the last Scene of Hamlet, and another in Othello, Act IV. Sc. 1, show this undeniably. In the first, two lines are printed thus:

"Good night, sweet Prience,

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

The corrector at first rectified the misprint by obliterating the e in "Prience;" but, afterwards, concluding to make the line rhyme with the next, he marked out "sweet Prience" and substituted be blest; the couplet being then followed by an impudent, gag-like

ffinis,

and the rest of the Scene being stricken out. In the passage in Othello, when the Moor, just before he falls in a trance, says "Nature herself would not invest herselfe in such a shadowing passion, without some Instruction," the corrector first changes "shadowing" to shuddering, and strikes out the comma after "passion;" but, concluding to do without the sentence, draws his pen remorselessly through it. And in The Merchant of Venice, Act V. Sc. 1, the folio of 1632 has,

"Therefore the poet did feign

That Orpheus drew tears, stones, floods," &c.

Here "tears" is a misprint for trees, which appears in the first folio, and in the two early quartos; but the MS. corrector, deceived by the likeness of tears to beasts, substituted the latter word at first; after referring to the other editions, however, he restores the right word, trees. If this be not conjecture, Nahum Tate wrote King Lear. Conjecture helped or hindered this corrector as it did those of the dozen or more copies of the other "rude and uncritical editions" which "sufficed for a century." But neither the number-four-of these editions, nor their careless printing, shows that Shakespeare's works were "little known or prized;" for half that number of editions sufficed for every other dramatist of that century; and all, except those of careful Ben Jonson, were vilely printed.

The private plates of fac similes of Mr. Collier's folio contain brief extracts from seventeen plays: Tempest, Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Winter's Tale, Henry V., Richard III., Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. A close examination of these fac similes only furnishes cumulative evidence in favor of the conclusions to which we have already arrived.

There is one of them the very look of which would seem fatal to the least pretence in favor of the authority of the volume. Types can but poorly convey the effect of the changes upon the eye; but they may help the imagination to picture the appearance of the page. The passage is the following, from Titus Andronicus, Act II. Sc. 2.

"Tit.-The hunt is up, the morne is bright and gray, The fields are fragrant, and the Woods are greene: Vncouple heere, and let us make a bay,

And wake the Emperour and his lovely Bride,

And rouze the Prince; and ring a hunter's peals,
That all the Court may eccho with the noise.
Sonnes, let it be your charge, as it is ours,
To attend the Emperour's person carefully:
I have bene troubled in my sleepe this night.
But dawning day new comfort has inspir'd."

These lines are thus changed in Mr. Collier's folio; the original words being erased, and the substitutes, here in italics, written in the margin:

"Tit.—The hunt is up, the morne is bright and gay,
The fields are fragrant, and the Woods are wide.
Vncouple heere, and let us make a bay,
And wake the Emperour and his lovely Bride,
And rouze the Prince, and sing a hunter's round,
That all the Court may eccho with the sound.
Sonnes, let it be your charge, and so will I,
To attend the Emperour's person carefully:
I have bene troubled in my sleepe this night,

But dawning day brought comfort and delight."

Can any man in his senses believe that "greene" could be misprinted for wide, "peals" for round, "noise" for sound, "as it is ours" for and so will I, "new" for brought, and "hath inspir'd" for and delight; and that all these errors, with two others, could occur in ten lines? The supposition is too absurd for a moment's consideration. The words do not bear the slightest possible likeness to each other; and besides, we must remember that if Mr. Collier's folio be worth any thing as an authority, the compositor made these mistakes, which are impossible under any circumstances, even when he had rhymes to guide him. And yet we are asked to believe that all this did happen.

But if the folio have any authority, we must believe in all these impossible errors of the press, and believe that Shakespeare did not write the last part of the last Scene to be played. For authority implies a right to submission,

irrespective of any exercise of reason or preference on the part of the person submitting. To contend for the authority of a part only, greater or less, of the emendations in this or any other folio, is to contend for a patent, palpable absurdity. It is as if a legatee were to claim that such parts of the will of the testator as accorded with his, the legatee's, views, had authority, but that those which he did not like had no authority. If we defer to a single change in Mr. Collier's folio because of its authority, we must defer to all; for we have the same testimony, or rather want of testimony, to the authenticity of all the changes that we have to that of any one of them. Therefore, as the few and rapidly diminishing believers in Mr. Collier's folio, can bring themselves to contend for only a majority of its changes of the authentic text, and as Mr. Collier himself says, in the Preface to his late edition of the Plays of Shakespeare, that "it is not to be understood that he approves of all the changes in the text," it is plain that even the discoverer and the advocates of this volume exercise their individual judgment in accepting or rejecting the changes of the text in it; and, by their own confession, do not defer to its authority. Thus they yield the only essential point. There can be no objection to any man, or any number of men, amusing themselves by making needless and absurd changes in the text of any author, so long as they do not contend for the authenticity of those changes, and insist upon their usurpation of the authority of the original text. As Mr. Collier and his dwindling band of submissive followers acknowledge that they do not contend for all the changes, the only important point in dispute is gained; and they themselves, by their exercise of judgment as to which they shall approve and which they shall condemn, have applied Malone's unexceptionable rule to them as "arbitrary emendations, made at the

not au

will and pleasure of the conjecturer, thorized by authentic copies printed or manuscript, and to be judged of by their reasonableness or probability." The verdict of Shakesperian scholars upon their “reasonableness or probability" has been unanimous, that an overwhelming majority are unreasonable and improbable; and the good sense and instinctive perception of the intelligent readers of Shakespeare is fast leading them to the same conclusion.

Faith in the first folio, and a distrust of the MS. corrector, do not rest upon a petitio principii as the Reviewer would have it. We have the direct and explicit testimony of Shakespeare's friends, fellow actors and principal partners in the theatre, that the first folio was printed from the text of Shakespeare, and, errors excepted, does contain that text; it is undeniably manifest that the corrector did indulge in "mere guess-work;" and therefore, as against the authorized edition, we must consider all his labors as merely conjectural, and only to be received when they consistently correct the palpable accidental errors of that edition. But were this not so, nine tenths of those peculiar to him would be rejected upon their own merits. They seem to be modelled upon the conjectural effort of the man who, not being able to understand the strong figure, "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel," amended his New Testament to read, "strain at a gate and swallow a saw-mill.”

But after all, it is not improbable that Richard Perkins did make some of these corrections. It was admitted, for the argument's sake, that he did make them; but now having seen that his making them gives them no semblance of authority, it is safe to say that it is even more than probable that he had a hand in them. It seems that this Richard Perkins was not only an actor but "also in some measure a poet, as he wrote a copy of verses prefixed to Heywood's