one thousand six hundred and fifty-four emendations of the text.”
The number of lines collated in the plays, he tells us, amounted to nearly one hundred thousand. The errors alleged by his critic are thirteen; but as five are his own mistakes, the actual numbers are eight. So enormous a tax on industry has been rarely so successful in its results.
However unanimous our national love of Shakspeare, no love whatever exists among those who make him a theme for the exercise of their ingenuity. All his editors, critics, and commentators agree to differ—nay, not differ only, but wage war upon each other with all the fury of the celebrated genus of Kilkenny cats, who fight till not a fragment is left of either combatant! Utter extinction of an adversary—in pen and ink I mean—is the aim of most Shakspearemen—and why? Each has a new view, a new inference, a new conjecture, a new explanation, which, whether with or without a basis, he expects shall fill the post of honour and be alone accepted as truth.
Apparitions of such volumes haunt the reader’s path in every shop or stall of books. The eye scarcely rests upon one when another aims to thrust it into oblivion. To displace it is scarcely enough. The book and the writer must be gibbeted if it be only for inadvertence, as if he had committed one of the deadly sins. “Another and another still succeeds,” and meets with a similar fate. “Come like shadows, so depart,” is the rule for these pugnacious candidates for distinction. Few happily are destined to survive the contest. Were Shakspeare still more
