But the dropping of our _variorum_ volume upon the floor recalls us from our reverie, and, as we pick it up, we ask ourselves sadly, Is it fitting that we should have a Shakspeare according to plodding Malone or coarse-minded Steevens, both of whom would have had the headache all their lives after, could one of the Warwickshire plebeian's conceptions have got into their brains and stretched them, and who would have hidden under their bedclothes in a cold-sweat of terror, could they have seen the awful vision of Macbeth as he saw it? No! and to every other commentator who has wantonly tampered with the text, or obscured it with his inky cloud of paraphrase, we feel inclined to apply the quadrisyllable name of the brother of Agis, king of Sparta. Clearly, we should be grateful to an editor who feels it his chief duty to scrape away these barnacles from the brave old hull, to replace with the original heart-of-oak the planks where these small but patient terebrators have bored away the tough fibre to fill the gap with sawdust! This task Mr. White has undertaken, and, after such conscientious examination of his work as the importance of it demands, after a painful comparison, note by note, and reading by reading, of his edition with those of Messrs. Knight, Collier, and Dyce, our opinion of his ability and fitness for his task has been heightened and confirmed. Not that we always agree with him,--not that we do not think that in respect of the Folio text he has sometimes erred on the side of superstitious reverence for it, and sometimes in too rashly abandoning it,--but, making all due exceptions, we think that his edition is, in the phrase of our New England fathers in Israel, for substance, scope, and aim, the best hitherto published. The chief matter must in all cases be the text, and the faults we find in him do not, as a general rule, affect that. Some of them are faults which his own better judgment, we think, will lead him to avoid in his forthcoming volumes; and in regard to some, he will probably honestly disagree with us as to their being faults at all. No conceivable edition of Shakspeare would satisfy all tastes;--sometimes we have attached associations to received readings which make impartial perception impossible; sometimes we have imparted our own meaning to a passage by too steady pondering over it, just as in twilight an inanimate thing will seem to move, if we look at it long, though the wavering be truly in our own overstrained vision; sometimes our personal temperament will insensibly warp our judgment;--but Mr. White has generally shown so just a discrimination, that there are few instances where we dissent, and in these a pencil will enable every one to edit for himself. Any criticism of an edition of Shakspeare must necessarily concern itself with seemingly insignificant matters, often with a comma or a syllable,--and the danger is always of degenerating into a