emendations. Let their precise pedigree be in the last case recorded with the most absolute brevity; simply the suggestion, and the names of its proposers and adopters.

IV. To simplify this last point, a new siglation might be introduced to denote the various critical editions.

Such a publication should be kept distinct from any commentary; especially from one laid out in the broad flat style of modern editors. Mr. Collier's volume of Emendations, &c., for instance, need not have occupied half its present space, if he had first denoted his MS. corrector by some short symbol, instead of by a lengthy phrase; and, secondly, introduced his suggestions by some such formularies as those employed in classical criticisms, instead of toiling laboriously after variations in his style of expression, till we are wearied by the real iteration which lies under the seeming diversity.

There should be none of this phrasework in the digest which I recommend. If indeed it were found absolutely necessary to connect it with a commentary, then arrange the two portions of the

apparatus as in Arnold's edition of Thucydides: the variæ lectiones in the middle of the page, and the comment in a different type below it. But I repeat, it would be better still to give us the digest without the comment. All would go into one large volume. And it cannot be doubted that such a volume, if thoroughly well done, would furnish at once a sort of textus receptus, and a critical basis, from which future editors might commence their labours. It would also be an indispensable book of reference to all who treat of, or are interested in, the poet's text. Such, I say, would be its certain prospects if the editor were at once an accurate, painstaking scholar, and a man of true poetical feeling. The labour would be great, but so would be the reward. It is only what the ablest scholars have proudly undertaken for the classics, even in the face of toils far more severe. Would that Mr. Dyce could be roused to attempt it!

B.

Emendations of Shakspeare.—I am sadly afraid, what with one annotator and another, that we, in a very little time, shall have Shakspeare so modernised and weeded of his peculiarities, that he will become a very second-rate sort of a person indeed; for I now see with no little alarm, that one of his most delightful quaintnesses is to give way to the march of refinement, and be altogether ruined. Hazlitt, one the most original and talented of critics, has somewhere said, that there was not in any passage of Shakspeare any single word that could be changed to one more appropriate, and as an instance he gives a passage from Macbeth, which certainly is one of the most perfect and beautiful to be found in the whole of his works: