The quotation from the _History of Lewes_ was first pointed out by your learned correspondent, MR. M. A. LOWER, in a communication to Mr. Halliwell's _Archæologist_, 1842, p. 129. The investigation of the origin of this popular collection of old _Joe Millerisms_ is of some importance, because upon them rests Dr. Boorde's title to be the "progenitor of Merry Andrew." EDWARD F. RIMBAULT. SHAKSPEARE NOTES. Who was the editor of _The Poems and Plays of William Shakspeare_, eight vols. 8vo., published by Scott and Webster in 1833? In that edition the following passage from _The Merchant of Venice_, Act III. Sc. 2., is _pointed_ in this way:-- "Thus ornament is but the guiled shore To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf Veiling an Indian; beauty's, in a word, The seeming truth which cunning times put on To entrap the wisest." To which the anonymous editor appends the following note:-- "I have deviated slightly from the folio--the ordinary reading represents ornament as '_the beauteous scarf veiling an Indian beauty_,' a sentence which by no means serves to illustrate the reflexion which Bassanio wishes to enforce. Sir Thomas Hanmer proposed to read _dowdy_ for beauty!" My object in this quotation is not that of commending the emendation, but of affording an opportunity of recording the following reasons which induce me to reject it; not only as no improvement to the sense, but as a positive injury to it. 1st. The argument of Bassanio is directed against the deceptiveness of ornament in general, of which seeming beauty is only one of the subordinate illustrations. These illustrations are drawn from _law_, _religion_, _valour_, and _beauty_; all of which are finally summed up in the passage in question, beginning "_Thus ornament_," &c. and still further concentrated in the phrase "_in a word_." Therefore this summing up cannot refer singly to _beauty_, no more than to any other of the subordinate illustrations, but it must have general reference to adventitious ornament, against which _the collected argument_ is directed. 2ndly. The word _beauty_ is necessarily attached to Indian as designative _of sex_: "an Indian," unqualified by any other distinction, would imply a male; but an "Indian beauty" is at once understood to be a female.