diffidence of this change, whom the severe
discipline of many years' study, and the daily access of accumulating
knowledge, have schooled into a wholesome sense of their extreme
fallibility in such matters. Without adding any comment, I now quote, for
the inspection of learned and unlearned, the two ensuing extracts:

"For Critias manaced and thretened hym, that onelesse he _chaumbreed_
his tongue in season, ther should ere l[=o]g bee one oxe the fewer for
hym."--_Apoptheymis of Erasmus_, translated by Nicolas Vdall,
MCCCCCXLII, the First Booke, p. 10.

"From no sorte of menne in the worlde did he refrein or _chaumbre_ the
tauntying of his tongue."--_Id._, p. 76.

After so many Notes, one Query. In the second folio edition of Shakspeare
(my first folio wants the whole play), I find in _Cymbeline_, Act V. Sc.
3., the next beautiful passage:

"_Post._ Still going? This is a lord: Oh noble misery
To be ith' field, and aske what newes of me:
To-day how many would have given their honors
To have sav'd their carkasses? Tooke heele to doo't,
And yet dyed too. I in mine owne woe charm'd,
Could not find death, where I did heare him groane,
Nor feele him where he strooke. Being an ugly monster,
'Tis strange he hides him in fresh cups, soft beds,
Sweet words; or hath moe ministers then we
That draw his knives ith' war. Well I will finde him:
For being now a favourer to the Britaine,
No more a Britaine, I have resum'd againe
The part I came in."

In the antepenultimate line, Britaine was more than a century ago changed
by Hanmer into Roman, therefore retained by Warburton, again rejected by
Steevens and Johnson, once more replaced by Knight and Collier, with one of
his usual happy notes by the former of the two, without comment by the
latter, finally left unnoticed by Dyce. My Query then is this. What amount
of obtuseness will disqualify a criticaster who itches to be tinkering and
cobbling the noblest passages of thought that ever issued from mortal
brain, while at the same time he stumbles and bungles in sentences of that
simplicity and grammatical clearness, as not to tax the powers of a
third-form schoolboy to explain?[1] If editors, commentators, {568}
critics, and all the countless throng who are ambitious to daub with their
un-tempered mortar, or scribble their names upon the most majestic edifice
of genius that the world ever saw, lack the little discernment necessary t