This fundamental principle is well enforced and illustrated in Dr. Ingleby's book, which was originally published in one of the Annuals of the German Shakespeare Society under the title of _The Still Lion_, a title suggested by a passage in De Quincey, where the danger of meddling with Milton's text is compared to that of meddling with a still lion, which may be neither dead nor sleeping, but merely shamming. Dr. Ingleby substitutes Shakespeare for Milton, and maintains that the mass of Shakespearian emendations that have been proposed during the last twenty years are needless; and that corruptions have been assumed where none exist, owing to the limited knowledge possessed by the critics. Thus, for instance, in the _Comedy of Errors_ (I. i. 152) the Duke bids Aegeon to "seek thy _help_ by beneficial _help_." At once there is a chorus from all of us, sciolists, of "Corruption!" "Sophistication!" "Cacophonous repetition!" etc. etc. "But gently, friends," says Dr. Ingleby: "may not 'help' have borne a different or a special meaning in Elizabethan English?" and turning to medical writers and books on medicine of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (among them Dr. John Hall, Shakespeare's own son-in-law), he proves that _heal_ and _help_ having a common origin, _help_ was used by Shakespeare's contemporaries as a synonym for _cure, deliverance_. The text, then, is perfectly correct, Ægeon being bid to seek his _deliverance_ from the doom of death by the _help_ of what friends he can find. The lion's slumbers were here of the lightest, and happy men be our dole to have escaped with whole skins. Thus Dr. Ingleby takes up passage after passage of Shakespeare that has been pronounced corrupt, and shows that the fault imputed to it lies not in the text, but in the lack of requisite knowledge, be it of language, of usage, of manners and customs, or even of Elizabethan spelling and grammar, on the part of the critic. The mischief that ignorance has done in the past is irrevocable, but such impressive warnings as Dr. Ingleby gives us may help, in both senses of the word, in the future. We may be spared, hereafter, the infliction of numberless "felicitous" conjectures, on which the following is scarcely a parody. It was proposed many years ago in sport by the late deeply-lamented Chauncey Wright, and, as far as we know, has never yet appeared in print, though it may live to be gravely noted down in some future Variorum, being a genuine echo of many a note by Zachary Jackson or Andrew Beckett. In _As You Like It_ occur the familiar lines, "And thus our life ... finds ... books in the running brooks, sermons in stones," etc. "This is stark nonsense, and must be remedied. Who ever found a _book_ in a _rivulet_ or a _sermon_ in a _rock?_ It is clearly an error of a most ignorant or careless compositor, who has transposed the nouns. Read, '_stones in the running brooks and sermons in books_.' Sense is vindicated. Stones are frequently found in brooks.