His having had losses evidently meaning, though he was then poor, that his circumstances were at one time so prosperous, that he could afford to _bear_ losses; and he, even then, had a superfluity of wardrobe in "two gowns, and everything handsome about him." But this little word _losses_, the perfect Shakspearian quaintness of which is universally acknowledged, is to be changed into _leases_; if it should be _leases_, how is it that it does not follow upon "householder," instead of being introduced so many words after? as, if _leases_ were the proper word, it would assuredly have suggested itself immediately as an additional item to his respectability as a householder: for a moment only fancy similar corrections to be introduced in others of Shakspeare's plays, and Falstaff be made to exclaim at the robbery at Gad's Hill, "Down with them, they dislike us old men," instead of "they hate us youth;" for Falstaff was no boy at the time, and this might be advanced as an authority for the emendation. But seriously, if this alteration is sent forth as a specimen of the improvements about to be effected in Shakspeare, from an edition of his plays lately discovered, I shall, for one, deeply regret that it was ever rescued front its oblivion; for with my prejudices and prepossessions against interpolations, and in favour of old readings, I shall find it no easy matter to reconcile my mind to the new. Strip history of its romance, and you deprive it of its principal charm; the scenery of a play-house imposes upon us an illusion, and though we know it to be so, it is not essential that the impression should be removed. I remember once travelling at night in Norfolk, and a part of my way was through a wood, at the end of which I came upon a lake lit up by a magnificent moon. I subsequently went the same road by day: the wood, I then found, was a mere belt of trees, and the lake had dwindled to a duck-pond. I have ever since wished that the first impression had remained unchanged; but this is a digression. There is no author so universal as Shakspeare, and would that be the case if he was not thoroughly understood? He is appreciated alike in the closet and on the stage, quoted by saints and sages, in the pulpit and the senate, and your nostrum-monger advertises his wares with a quotation from his pages; does he then require interpreting who is his own interpreter? Johnson says of him that-- "Panting Time toil'd after him in vain." {76} And that he-- "Exhausted worlds and then imagined new."