r the opportunity
of darkness:

"Come, _civil_ night,
Thou sober suited matron all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning game," &c.

The peculiar and unusual epithet "civil," here applied to night, at once
assured me of the accuracy of the proposed reading, it having evidently
suggested itself as the antithesis of "rude" just before applied to day;
the civil, accommodating, concealing night being thus contrasted with the
unaccommodating, revealing day. It is to be remarked, moreover, that as
this epithet _civil_ is, through its ordinary signification, brought into
connexion with what precedes it, so is it, through its unusual meaning of
_grave_, brought into connexion with what follows, it thus furnishing that
equivocation of sense of which our great dramatist is so fond, rarely
missing an opportunity of "paltering with us in a double sense."

I think, therefore, I may venture to offer you the proposed emendation as
rigorously fulfilling all the requirements of the text, while at the same
time it necessitates a very trifling literal disturbance of the old
reading, since by the simple change of the letters _naw_ into _ded_, we
convert "runaways'" into "rude day's," of which it was a very easy
misprint.

Having offered you an emendation of my own, I cannot miss the opportunity
of sending you {217} another, for which I am indebted to a critical student
of Shakspeare, my friend Mr. W. R. Grove, the Queen's Counsel. In _All's
Well that ends Well_, the third scene of the Second Act opens with the
following speech from Lafeu:

"They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to
make modern and familiar things, supernatural and causeless. Hence is
it that we make trifles of terrors; ensconcing ourselves in a seeming
knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear."

On reading this passage as thus printed, it will be seen that the two
sentences of which it is composed are in direct contradiction to each
other; the first asserting that we have philosophers who give a causeless
and supernatural character to things ordinary and familiar: the second
stating as the result of this, "that we make trifles of terrors," whereas
the tendency would necessarily be to make "terrors of trifles." The
confusion arises from the careless pointing of the first sentence. By
simply shifting the comma at present after "things," and placing it after
"familiar," the discrepan