_Emendations of Shakspeare._--I am sadly afraid, what with one annotator and another, that we, in a very little time, shall have Shakspeare so modernised and weeded of his peculiarities, that he will become a very second-rate sort of a person indeed; for I now see with no little alarm, that one of his most delightful quaintnesses is to give way to the march of refinement, and be altogether ruined. Hazlitt, one the most original and talented of critics, has somewhere said, that there was not in any passage of Shakspeare any single word that could be changed to one more appropriate, and as an instance he gives a passage from _Macbeth_, which certainly is one of the most perfect and beautiful to be found in the whole of his works: "This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses. This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, buttress, Nor coin of vantage, but this bird hath made His pendent bed, and procreant cradle: where they Most breed and haunt, I have observed, the air Is delicate." There are some who differ from Hazlitt in the present day, and assert that there is an error in the press in Dogberry's reproof of Borachio for calling him an "ass." The passage as it stands is as follows: "I am a wise fellow; and which is more, an officer, and which is more, a _householder_, and which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina, and one that knows the law, go to; and a rich fellow enough, go to; and a fellow that hath had _losses_, and one that hath two gowns, and everything handsome about him."