e
humor of the title would tally precisely with what Ben Jonson tells us
in his 'Discoveries,' under the head _Dominus Verulamius_, that
'his language _(where he could spare or pass by a jest)_ was nobly
censorious.' Sir Thomas More had the same proneness to merriment,
a coincidence the more striking as both these great men were Lord
Chancellors. A comic stroke of this description would have been highly
attractive to a mind so constituted, and might easily escape the notice
of a printer, who was more likely to be intent upon the literal accuracy
of the Latin than on the watch for extraordinary flights of humor."
SMITH.

But we must return from our excursion into an imaginary _variorum_,
delightful because it requires no eyesight and no thought, to the more
serious duty of examining the notes of Mr. White. We have mentioned a
single instance in which we differ with him as to the propriety of a
fanatical adherence to the text of the Folio of 1623. We differ, because
we think that sense is not all that we have a right to expect from
Shakspeare,--that it is, indeed, merely the body in which his genius
creates a soul of meaning, nay, oftentimes a double one, exoteric and
esoteric, the _spiritus astralis_ and the _anima caelestis_. Had the
passage been in verse, where the change might have damaged the rhythm,
--had it been one of those ecstasies of Shakspearian imagination,
to tamper with which because _we_ could not understand it would be
Bottom-like presumption,--one of those tempests of passion where every
word reeks hot and sulphurous, like a thunderstone new-fallen,--in any
of these cases we should have agreed with Mr. White that to abstain was
a duty. But in a sentence of lightsome and careless prose, and where the
chances are great that the word to be changed is the accident of the
printer and not the choice of the author, we say, give us a text that is
true to the context and the aesthetic instinct rather than to the Folio,
even were that Pandora-box only half as full of manifest corruptions as
it is.

In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," (Act iii. Sc. 1,) Mr. White prefers,
"She is not to be fasting in respect of her breath," to "She is not to
be _kissed_ fasting in respect of her breath,"--an emendation made by
Rowe,[F] and found also in Mr. Collier's Corrected Folio of 1632. We
cannot agree with him in a reading which seems to us to destroy all the
point of the passage.

[Footnote F: Mr. Dyce says the word supplie