GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS
my conjecture. For if, as so many believe, "runawayes" was a misprint, it is quite probable that the blindly-written word in the manuscript was no more like the printer's substitute than like any one of fifty others that would fill the allotted space. With Grant White, I am not troubled by the absence of a long letter in my word, to correspond with the y in "runawayes." "Rumoures eyes" is not a bad guess. One might accept it, but for the cousinship of the two soliloquies. I make no account of "rude day's," "runagate's," "enemies'," "unawares," and a dozen other far-fetched guesses of prosaic scholiasts. The one claim of several is that they begin with R. But the slightest bend of the second down-stroke in the written N (Elizabethan) transforms it into R; so that "nature's" need not be debarred on that score.
The mutual likeness of the two soliloquies crops out here and there throughout them. Its most curious vagary is the fantastic, elfish sound-echo, in Juliet's speech, of the weak lines in Faustus:
O soul, be chang'd into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!
This reappears,—the meaning apart,—in
Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little starres, etc.
There is good warrant for our natural faith in tradition, in the correct transmission of ancient "in-
[286]
