inting of words, but on the misplacing of whole paragraphs. We were
struck with the same thing in the original edition of Chapman's _Biron's
Conspiracy and Tragedy_. One of the misprints which Mr. Spedding notices
affords both a hint and a warning to the conjectural emendator. In the
edition of _The Advancement of Learning_ printed in 1605 occurs the
word _dusinesse_. In a later edition this was conjecturally changed to
_business_; but the occurrence of _vertigine_ in the Latin translation
enables Mr. Spedding to print rightly, _dizziness_.]

Nevertheless, however strong a case may be made out against the Folio of
1623, whatever sins of omission we may lay to the charge of Heminge and
Condell, or of commission to that of the printers, it remains the only
text we have with any claims whatever to authenticity. It should be
deferred to as authority in all cases where it does not make Shakspeare
write bad sense, uncouth metre, or false grammar, of all which we
believe him to have been more supremely incapable than any other man who
ever wrote English. Yet we would not speak unkindly even of the blunders
of the Folio. They have put bread into the mouth of many an honest
editor, publisher, and printer, for the last century and a half; and he
who loves the comic side of human nature will find the serious notes of
a _variorum_ edition of Shakspeare as funny reading as the funny ones
are serious. Scarce a commentator of them all, for more than a hundred
years, but thought, as Alphonso of Castile did of Creation, that, if
he had only been at Shakspeare's elbow, he could have given valuable
advice; scarce one who did not know off-hand that there was never a
seaport in Bohemia,--as if Shakspeare's world were one which Mercator
could have projected; scarce one but was satisfied that his ten
finger-tips were a sufficient key to those astronomic wonders of poise
and counterpoise, of planetary law and cometary seeming-exception, in
his metres; scarce one but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin
that intuition whose edging shallows may have been sounded, but
whose abysses, stretching down amid the sunless roots of Being and
Consciousness, mock the plummet; scarce one but could speak with
condescending approval of that prodigious intelligence so utterly
without congener that our baffled language must coin an adjective to
qualify it, and none is so audacious as to say Shakspearian of any
other. And yet, in the midst of our impatience,