In a former paper I had occasion to notice the intimate knowledge possessed by Shakspeare in the arcana of the several arts; and I now recognise, in this passage, a metaphorical allusion to the degradation of gold by the admixture of baser metal. _Gold_ and _lead_ have always been in poetical opposition as types of the _noble_ and the _base_; and we are assured by metallurgists, that if lead be added to gold, even in the small proportion of one part in two thousand, the whole mass is rendered completely brittle. The question then is, in what way "the dram of base" affects "all the noble substance?" Shakspeare says it renders it doubtful or suspicious; his commentators _make him say_ that it _douts_ or extinguishes it altogether! And this they do without even the excuse of an originally imperfect word to exercise conjecture upon. The original word is _doubt_, the amended one _dout_; and yet the first has been rejected, and the latter adopted, in editions whose peculiar boast it is to have restored, in every practicable instance, the original text. Now, in my opinion, Shakspeare did not intend _doubt_ in this place, to be a verb at all, but a noun substantive: and it is the more necessary that this point should be discussed, because the amended passage has already crept into our dictionaries as authority for the verb _dout_; thus giving to a very questionable emendation the weight of an acknowledged text. (Vide Todd's _Johnson_.) Any person who takes the amended passage, as quoted at the head of this article, and restores "dout," to its original spelling, will find that the chief hindrance to a perfect meaning consists in the restriction of _doth_ to the value of a mere expletive. Let this restriction be removed, by conferring upon _doth_ the value of an _effective verb_, and it will be seen that the difficulty no longer remains. The sense then becomes, "the base _doth_ doubt to the noble," i.e. _imparts_ doubt to it, or renders it doubtful. We say, a man's good actions _do him credit_; why not also, his bad ones _do him doubt_? One phrase may be less familiar than the other, but they are in strict analogy as well with themselves as with the following example from the _Twelfth Night_, which is exactly in point: "Thou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame." Hence, since the original word is capable of giving a clear and distinct meaning, there can be no possible excuse for displacing it, even if the word to be substituted were as faultless as it is certainly the reverse.