Mr. Halliwell, at the close of his Preface to the Works of Marston, (Vol. I. p. xxii.,) says, "The dramas now collected together are reprinted absolutely from the early editions, which were placed in the hands of our printers, who thus had the advantage of following them without the intervention of a transcriber. They are given as nearly as possible in their original state, the only modernizations attempted consisting in the alternations of the letters _i_ and _j_, and _u_ and _v_, the retention of which" (does Mr. Halliwell mean the letters or the "alternations"?) "would have answered no useful purpose, while it would have unnecessarily perplexed the modern reader." This not very clear; but as Mr. Halliwell is a member of several learned foreign societies, and especially of the Royal _Irish_ Academy, perhaps it would he unfair to demand that he should write clear English. As one of Mr. Smith's editors, it was to be expected that he should not write it idiomatically. Some malign constellation (Taurus, perhaps, whose infaust aspect may be supposed to preside over the makers of bulls and blunders) seems to have been in conjunction with heavy Saturn when the Library was projected. At the top of the same page from which we have made our quotation, Mr. Halliwell speaks of "conveying a favorable impression _on_ modern readers." It was surely to no such phrase as this that Ensign Pistol alluded when he said, "_Convey_ the _wise_ it call." A literal reprint of an old author may be of value in two ways: the orthography may in certain cases indicate the ancient pronunciation, or it may put us on a scent which shall lead us to the burrow of a word among the roots of language. But in order to this, it surely is not needful to undertake the reproduction of all the original errors of the press; and even were it so, the proofs of carelessness in the editorial department are so glaring, that we are left in doubt, after all, if we may congratulate ourselves on possessing all these sacred blunders of the Elizabethan typesetters in their integrity and without any debasement of modern alloy. If it be gratifying to know that there lived stupid men before our contemporary Agamemnons in that kind, yet we demand absolute accuracy in the report of the _phenomena_ in order to arrive at anything like safe statistics. For instance, we find (Vol. I. p. 89) "ACTUS SECUNDUS, SCENA PRIMUS," and (Vol. III. p. 174) "_exit ambo_," and we are interested to know that in a London printing-house, two centuries and a half ago, there was a philanthropist who wished to simplify the study of the Latin language by reducing all the nouns to one gender and all the verbs to one number. Had his emancipated theories of grammar prevailed, how much easier would that part of boys which cherubs want have found the school-room benches! How would birchen bark, as an educational tonic, have fallen in repute! How white would have been the (now black-and-blue) memories of Dr.