MR. COLLIER'S discovery was, perhaps, of even greater interest to myself than to others, not merely on account of its being an important evidence for the state of the text, _but because I had long since had the opportunity of using a volume of precisely similar character_, namely, the copy of the third folio, with numerous MS. emendations in a coeval hand, mentioned by Lowndes, p. 1646., as having some years since sold for 65_l._, on account of those MS. emendations. This volume contains several hundred very curious and important corrections, amongst which I may mention an entirely new reading of the difficult passage at the commencement of _Measure for Measure_, which carries conviction with it, and shows, what might have been reasonably expected, that _that to_ is a misprint _for a verb_. There are numerous other corrections of equal importance, but I forbear at present to notice them, under the conviction it is not safe to adopt MS. corrections, unless we know on what authority they are made. It was on this account I ventured to indicate the extreme danger of adopting any of the MS. readings of MR. COLLIER'S second folio, without a most rigid examination, or until their authority was unquestionably ascertained. Now, in MR. COLLIER'S first two communications to the _Athenæum_ there was scarcely a single example which indicated it was derived from an authentic source, but many, on the other hand, which could be well believed to be mere guess-work; and it was rather alarming to see the readiness with which they were received, threatening the loss of Shakspeare's genuine text. A ray of light, however, at length appears in the new reading in _Coriolanus_. This, more than any other, gives hopes of important results; and it does something more than this: it opens a reasonable expectation that the MS. corrector had, in some cases, recollection of the passages as they were delivered in representation. Once establish a probability of this, and although many of the corrections must still be looked upon as conjectural, the volume will be of high value. The correction "_bisson multitude_" seems to me to be clearly one of those alterations that no conjectural ingenuity could have suggested. The volume has evidently been used for stage purposes; and it may be taken as almost beyond a doubt that that particular correction was made on authority. We can scarcely imagine that authority to be a MS. of the play, and are therefore thrown on the supposition the corrector sometimes altered from memory, and sometimes from conjecture, writing as he thought Shakspeare _ought_ to have written, even if he did not.