_Ethics_ was the patent title by which Aristotle's moral philosophy was universally known; therefore any ignoramus, who never dipped beyond the title, might, _and would_, have used it. But no person, except one well read in the philosophy itself, would think of giving it such a designation as _checks_; which word, nevertheless, is most happily characteristic of it. 3. Because, as before stated, Aristotle's _checks_, being the restrictive and regulating portion of Aristotle's _Ethics_, is necessarily a more diametrical antithesis to Ovid (and his _laxities_). 4. Because I look upon the use of this phrase as one of those nice and scarcely perceptible touches by which Shakspeare was content rather to hint at, than to disclose his knowledge,--one of those effects whereby he makes a single word supply the place of a treatise. With these opinions, I cannot but look upon this threatened change of _checks_ into _ethics_, as wholly unwarrantable, and I now protest against it as earnestly as, upon a former occasion, I did against the alteration of _sickles_ into _shekels_, or, still worse, into _cycles_ or into _circles_. It is with great satisfaction I compare four different views taken of this word by MR. COLLIER, viz.--in the note to the text of his octavo edition of Shakspeare;--in an additional note in vol. i., page cclxxxiv. of that edition;--in the first announcement of his annotated folio in the _Athenaeum_ newspaper, Jan. 31st, 1852,--and finally (after my remarks upon the word in "N. & Q."), his virtual reinstatement of the original _sickle_ (till then supposed a palpable and undeniable misprint) at page 46. of _Notes and Emendations_, together with the production, _suo motu_, of an independent reference in support of my position. To return to this present substitution of _ethics_ for _checks_, a very singular circumstance connected with it is the ignoring, by both MR. COLLIER and by the critic in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, of Sir William Blackstone's original claim to the suggestion, by prior publication of upwards of half a century. At that time, notwithstanding the great learning and acuteness of the proposer, the alteration was rejected! And shall we now be less wise than our fathers? Shall we--misled by the prestige of a few drops of rusty ink fashioned into letters of formal cut--place implicit credence in emendations whose only claim to faith, like that of the Mormon scriptures, is that nobody knows whence they came? {498} In the passage I have quoted from Philemon Holland, there may be observed two peculiarities which are generally supposed to be exclusively Shakspearian: one is the beautiful application of the word "touch"--the other the phrase "discourse of reason." Where this last expression occurs in _Hamlet_, it narrowly escaped _emendation_ at the hands of Gifford! (See Mr. Knight's note, in his illustrated edition of _Shakspeare_.) It is the true Aristotelian [Greek: dianoia].