{262b} This form is used four times by Shakespeare as the equivalent of
Bretagne; once only, in one of his latest plays, as a synonym for
Britain.

{263a} Another word indiscoverable in any genuine verse of
Shakespeare's, though not (I believe) unused on occasion by some among
the poets contemporary with his earlier years.

{263b} This word was perhaps unnecessarily altered by our good Capell to
"tender."

{264a} Yet another and a singular misuse of a word never so used or
misused by Shakespeare.

{264b} Qu. Why, so is your desire: If that the law, etc.?

{264c} _Sic_. I should once have thought it impossible that any mortal
ear could endure the shock of this unspeakable and incomparable verse,
and find in the passage which contains it an echo or a trace of the
"music, wit, and oracle" of Shakespeare. But in those days I had yet to
learn what manner of ears are pricked up to listen "when rank Thersites
opes his mastiff jaws" in criticism of Homer or of Shakespeare. In a
corner of the preface to an edition of "Shakspere" which bears on its
title-page the name (correctly spelt) of Queen Victoria's youngest son
prefixed to the name I have just transcribed, a small pellet of dry dirt
was flung upwards at me from behind by the "able editor" thus irritably
impatient to figure in public as the volunteer valet or literary lackey
of Prince Leopold. Hence I gathered the edifying assurance that this
aspirant to the honours of literature in livery had been reminded of my
humbler attempts in literature without a livery by the congenial music of
certain four-footed fellow-critics and fellow-lodgers of his own in the
neighbourhood of Hampstead Heath. Especially and most naturally had
their native woodnotes wild recalled to the listening biped (whom partial
nature had so far distinguished from the herd) the deep astonishment and
the due disgust with which he had discovered the unintelligible fact that
to men so ignorant of music or the laws of music in verse as my
presumptuous and pitiable self the test of metrical harmony lay not in an
appeal to the fingers but only in an appeal to the ear--"the ear which
he" (that is, which the present writer) "makes so much of--AND WHICH
SHOULD BE LONG TO MEASURE SHAKSPERE." Here then the great Sham
Shakespearean secret is out at last. Had I but known in time my lifelong
error in thinking that a capacity to estimate the refinements of word-
music was not to be gauged by length