aimed as a restoration
occurred also in Mr. Knight's excellent edition of 1842. These
oversights do not affect the correctness of Mr. White's text, but they
diminish our confidence in the accuracy of the collation to which he
lays claim.

The chief objection which we have to make against Mr. White's text is,
that he has perversely allowed it to continue disfigured by vulgarisms
of grammar and spelling. For example, he gives us _misconster_, and
says, "This is not a mis-spelling or loose spelling of 'misconstrue,'
but the old form of the word." Mr. Dyce insisted on the same
cacographical nicety in his "Remarks" on the editions of Mr. Collier and
Mr. Knight, but abandons it in his own with the artless admission that
_misconstrue_ also occurs in the Folio. In one of the Camden Society's
publications is a letter from Friar John Hylsey to Thomas Cromwell, in
which we find "As God is my jugge";[H] but we do not believe that _jug_
was an old form of _judge_, though a philological convict might fancy
that the former word was a derivative of the latter. Had the phrase
occurred in Shakspeare, we should have had somebody defending it as
tenderly poetical. We cannot but think it a sacrifice in Mr. White that
he has given up the _whatsomeres_ of the Folio. He does retain _puisny_
as the old form, but why not spell it _puisne_ and so indicate its
meaning? Mr. White informs us that "the grammatical form in use in
Shakspeare's day" was to have the verb govern a nominative case!
Accordingly, he perpetuates the following oversight of the poet or
blunder of the printer:--

[Footnote H: _Suppression of the Monasteries_, p. 13.]

"What he is, indeed,
More suits you to conceive, than _I_ to speak of."

Again, he says that _who_, as an objective case, "is in accordance with
the grammatical usage of Shakspeare's day," (Vol. II. p. 86,) and that,
"considering the unsettled state of minor grammatical relations in
Shakspeare's time," it is possible that he wrote _whom_ as a nominative
(Vol. V. p. 393). But the most extraordinary instance is where he makes
a nominative plural agree with a verb in the second person singular,
(Vol. III. p. 121,) and justifies it by saying that "such disagreements
... are not uncommon in Shakspeare's writings, and those of his
contemporaries." The passage reads as follows in Mr. White's edition:--

"A breath thou art,
Servile to all the skiey influences
That dost this habitation w