e spent
hour after hour and day after day in labors the only purpose of which
was directly at war with that which you attribute to him, and which, if
he made these manuscript corrections, must have been the motive of his
labors.

But if Mr. Collier, or some other man of this century, did not make
these orthographical changes, when were they made? Let us trace the
fortunes of _vile_, which is a good test word, as being characteristic,
and as it occurs several times in "Hamlet," and is there thrice
modernized by the manuscript corrector. It occurs five times in that
play, as the reader may see by referring to Mrs. Clarke's "Concordance."
In the folio of 1623, in all these cases, except the first, it is
spelled _vild_; in the folio of 1632, with the same exception, we also
find _vild_; even in the folio of 1664[ll] the spelling in all these
instances remains unchanged; but in the folio of 1685, _vild_ gives
place to _vile_ in every case. As with "vild," so with the other words
subjected to like changes. To make a long story short, the spelling
throughout the marginal readings of this folio, judged by the numerous
fac-similes and collations that have been published, indicates the close
of the last quarter of the century 1600 as the period about which the
volume in which they appear was subjected to correction. The careful
removal (though with some oversights) of those irregularities and
anomalies of spelling which were common before the Restoration, and the
harmonizing of grammatical discords which were disregarded before that
period, and, on the other hand, the retention of the superfluous final
_e_, (once the _e_ of prolongation,) and of the _l_ in the contractions
of "would," in accordance with a pronunciation which prevailed in
England until 1700 and later, all point to this date, which is also
indicated by various other internal proofs to which attention has been
heretofore sufficiently directed.[mm] The punctuation, too, which,
as Mr. Collier announced in "Notes and Emendations," etc., 1853, is
corrected "with nicety and patience," is that of the books printed after
the Restoration, as may be seen by a comparison of Mr. Collier's private
fac-similes and the collations of "Hamlet" in Mr. Hamilton's book with
the original editions of poems and plays printed between 1660 and 1675.

[Footnote ll: Or 1663, according to the title-pages of some copies that
we have seen.]

[Footnote mm: See _Shakespeare's Scholar_, pp. 56-