through some gerund-grinding laboratory. But the plain truth is, that works of imagination cannot be mechanized and done over into the forms of science, without a total dissipation of their life and spirit, of all indeed that is properly constitutive in them. It is simply like dissecting a bird in order to find out where the music comes from and how it is made.

I have, perhaps, dwelt upon this topic too long, and may fitly close it with a few pertinent words from Bacon, which always come into my remembrance when thinking on the subject. "The first distemper of learning," says he, "is when men study words and not matter. And how is it possible but this should have an operation to discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, when they see learned men's works like the first letter of a patent, or a limnèd book; which, though it hath large flourishes, yet is but a letter? It seems to me that Pygmalion's frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity: for words are but the images of matter; and, except they have the life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture." In another passage, he puts the matter as follows: "Surely, like as many substances in Nature which are solid do putrefy and corrupt into worms; so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to putrefy and dissolve into a number of subtile, idle, unwholesome, and (as I may term them) vermiculate questions, which have indeed a kind of quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality."

To preclude misapprehension, as far as may be, I must add that the foregoing remarks have an eye only to editions of the Poet designed for common use; and so cannot be justly construed as reflecting on such as look mainly to the special use of students and scholars. Doubtless there may be, nay, there must be, from time to time, say as often as

once in forty or fifty years, highly learned editions of Shakespeare; such, for instance, as Mr. Howard Furness's magnificent Variorum, which, so far as it has come, is a truly monumental achievement of learning, judgment, good sense, and conscientious, painstaking industry. Of course such a work must needs enter very largely into the details and processes of the subject, pursuing a great many points out through all the subtilties and intricacies of critical inquiry. But, for the generality of readers, such a handling of the theme is obviously quite out of the question: in this hard working-day world, they have too much else in hand to be tracing out and sifting the nice questions which it is the business of a profound and varied scholarship to investigate and settle; and the last and highest results of such scholarship is all that they can possibly have time or taste for. If any one says that common readers, such as at least ninetynine persons in a hundred are and must be, should have the details and processes of the work put before them, that so they may be enabled to form independent judgments for themselves; I say, whoever talks in this way is either under a delusion himself, or else means to delude others. It may flatter common readers to be told that they are just as competent to judge for themselves in these matters as those are who have made a lifelong study of them: but the plain truth is, that such readers must perforce either take the results of deep scholarship on trust, or else not have them at all; and none but a dupe or a quack, or perhaps a compound of the two, would ever think of representing the matter otherwise.

But the main business of this Preface is yet to come, and what remains must be chiefly occupied with certain questions touching the Poet's text. And here I must first make a brief general statement of the condition in which his text has

come down to us, leaving the particular details in this kind to be noted in connection with the several plays themselves.

Of the thirty-eight plays included in this edition, sixteen, or, if we count-in the originals of the Second and Third Parts of King Henry the Sixth, eighteen, were published, severally and successively, in what are known as the quarto editions, during the Poet's life. Some of them were printed in that form several times, but often with considerable variations of text. One more, Othello, was issued in that form in 1622, six years after the Poet's death. Copies of these editions are still extant, though in some cases exceedingly rare. Most of these issues were undoubtedly "stolen and surreptitious"; and it is nowise likely that in any of them a single page of the proofs was ever corrected by Shakespeare himself. In the popular literature of his time, proof-reading generally was done, if done at all, with such a degree of slovenliness as no one would think of tolerating now. And that proof-sheets can be rightly and properly corrected by none but the author himself, or by one very closely and minutely familiar with his mind, his mouth, and his hand, is a lesson which an experience of more than thirty years in the matter has taught me beyond all peradventure. And, in fact, the printing in most of these quarto issues is so shockingly bad, that no one can gain an adequate idea of how bad it is, except by minutely studying the text as there given, and comparing it in detail with the text as given in modern editions.

All the forecited plays, with one exception, Pericles, were set forth anew in the celebrated folio of 1623, seven years after the Poet's death. Most of them are indeed printed much better there than in the earlier issues, though some of them are well known to have been printed from quarto copies. Therewithal the folio set forth, for the first time, so far as is known, all the other plays included in this edition,

except The Two Noble Kinsmen. The volume was published, professedly at least, under the editorial care of the Poet's friends and fellow-actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell.

The printing of the folio is exceedingly unequal: in some of the plays, as, for instance, Julius Cæsar, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It, it is remarkably good for the time, insomuch that the text, generally, is got into an orderly and intelligible state without much trouble; while others, as All's Well, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens, abound in the grossest textual corruptions, so that the labour of rectification seems to be literally endless. Even where the printing is best, there are still so many palpable, and also so many more or less probable, misprints, that the text, do the best we can with it, must often stand under considerable uncertainty. It is not unlikely that in some parts of the volume the Editors themselves may have attended somewhat to the correcting of the proofs, while in others they left it entirely to the printers. Of course all the plays then first published must have been printed either from the author's own manuscripts, or else from play-house transcripts of them. Doubtless these were made by different hands, sometimes with reasonable care, sometimes otherwise, and so with widelyvarying degrees of accuracy and legibility.

In their "Address to the Readers," the Editors, after referring to the earlier quarto issues, go on as follows: "Even those are now offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest absolute in their numbers as he [the author] conceived them; who, as he was a happy imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers." Heminge and Condell appear to have been honest and amiable men; but they naturally felt a strong interest in having the volume sell well, and so were moved to recom

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mend it as highly as they could to purchasers. Probably there was something of truth in what they said, perhaps enough to excuse, if not to justify them in saying it nevertheless it is perfectly certain that their words were not true to the full extent; and most likely what was true only of a portion of the volume they deemed it right to put forth in a general way as if applicable to the whole, without staying to express any limitations or exceptions. The folio was reprinted in 1632, again in 1664, and yet again in 1685. The folio of 1632 was set forth with a good many textual changes, made by an unknown hand; sometimes corrections, and sometimes corruptions, but none of them carrying any authority. Changes of text, though less both in number. and importance, were also made in the third and fourth folios.

Before passing on from this topic, I must add that, after 1623, single plays continued to be reprinted, from time to time, in quarto form. But as these are seldom of any use towards ascertaining or helping the text, it seems not worth the while to specify them in detail. Probably the most valuable of them is that of Othello, issued in 1630. Others of them are occasionally referred to in the Critical Notes.

As I have frequent occasion to cite a famous volume, which I designate as "Collier's second folio," it appears needful to give some account thereof in this place. - In 1849, Mr. J. P. Collier, a very learned and eminent Shakespearian, lighted upon and purchased a copy of the second folio containing a very large number of verbal, literal, and punctuative alterations in manuscript; all of course intended as corrections of the text. At what time or times, and by what hand or hands, these changes were made, has not been settled, nor is likely to be. For some time there was a good deal of pretty warm controversy about them. All, I believe, are now pretty much agreed, and certainly