collection and editing of texts has proceeded on the most widely different
principles, and with an almost complete absence of that intelligent
partition of labour which alone can reduce chaos to order in such a case.
To give but one instance, there is actually no complete collection, though
various attempts have been made at it, which gives, with or without
sufficient editorial apparatus to supplement the canon, all the dramatic
_adespota_ which have been at one time or another attributed to Shakespere.
These at present the painful scholar can only get together in publications
abounding in duplicates, edited on the most opposite principles, and
equally troublesome either for library arrangement or for literary
reference. The editions of single authors have exhibited an equal absence
of method; one editor admitting doubtful plays or plays of part-authorship
which are easily accessible elsewhere, while another excludes those which
are difficult to be got at anywhere. It is impossible for any one who reads
literature as literature and not as a matter of idle crotchet, not to
reflect that if either of the societies which, during the nineteenth
century, have devoted themselves to the study of Shakespere and his
contemporaries, had chosen to employ their funds on it, a complete Corpus
of the drama between 1560 and 1660, edited with sufficient, but not
superfluous critical apparatus on a uniform plan, and in a decent if not a
luxurious form, might now be obtainable. Some forty or fifty volumes at the
outside on the scale of the "Globe" series, or of Messrs. Chatto's useful
reprints of Jonson, Chapman, and other dramatists, would probably contain
every play of the slightest interest, even to a voracious student--who
would then have all his material under his hand. What time, expense, and
trouble are required to obtain, and that very imperfectly, any such
advantage now, only those who have tried to do it know. Even Mr. Hazlitt's
welcome, if somewhat uncritical, reprint of Dodsley, long out of print, did
not boldly carry out its principle--though there are plans for improving
and supplementing it.

Nevertheless, if the difficulties are great so are the rewards. It has been
the deliberate opinion of many competent judges (neither unduly prejudiced
in favour of English literature nor touched with that ignorance of other
literature which is as fatal to judgment as actual prejudice) that in no
time or country has the literary interes