Throughout the volume there are proofs that they employed the best text which they could get, even when others were in print. It is owing to this volume, in all probability, that we possess twenty of the best of Shakespeare's plays and the best texts of a number of the others. We are therefore glad to hear that the edition was a success and was considered worth reprinting within nine years. It is not improbable that this edition ran to five hundred copies. Among the most interesting work of the editors of the volume was the prefixing of the Droeshout engraved portrait on the title-page, and an attempt to improve the stage directions, as well as the division of most of the plays, either in whole or in part, into acts and scenes. The twenty plays which appeared in print for the first time in the First Folio were taken in all probability directly from copies in the possession of Shakespeare's company. Their texts are, upon the whole, excellent. In the case of the sixteen other plays the editors substituted for eight of the plays already in print in quartos, independent texts from better manuscripts. This act must have involved considerable expense and difficulty, and deserves the highest praise. Five of the printed quartos were used with additions and corrections. In the case of _Titus Andronicus_ a whole scene was added. In three cases only {124} of the sixteen plays already printed did the editors follow a quarto text without correcting it from a later theatrical copy. This conscientious effort to give posterity the best text of Shakespeare deserves our gratitude. The Second Folio, 1632, was a reprint of the First; the Third Folio, 1663, a reprint of the Second; the Fourth Folio, 1685, a reprint of the Third. This practice of copying the latest accessible edition has been adopted by editors down to a very late period. Between 1629 and 1632 six quartos of Shakespearean plays were printed,--a fact which indicates that the First Folio edition had been exhausted and that there was a continued market. A man named Thomas Cotes acquired through one Richard Cotes the printing rights of the Jaggards, and added to them other rights derived from Pavier. The old publishers, Smethwick and Aspley, were still living and were associated with him in publishing the Second Folio. Robert Allott, June 26, 1629, had bought up Blount's title to the plays first registered in 1623, and was thus also concerned in the publication, while Richard Hawkins and Richard Meighen, who owned the rights of _Othello_ and _Merry Wives_, were allowed to take shares. The editors of the Second Folio made only such alterations in the text of the First Folio as they thought necessary to make it more "correct." The vast majority of the changes are unimportant grammatical corrections, some of them obviously right, others as obviously wrong.