It is almost inconceivable that grown men with enough interest in poetry to spend their whole lives in Shakespeare's company could have daubed him with such muddy nonsense as one finds in these notes, which are not the worst of scholarly comment but the best, selected by a discriminating man. What a colossal sham it all is!--erected not by charlatans but by men working in good faith and with disinterested devotion to their task. It is not merely the ignorant idler and the superficial player among books who has got tired of the institution of Shakespeare Improved: Fourteen Thousand Doctors of Philosophy in Session Day and Night, Searching for a Serum to Prevent Spinal Meningitis in the Lines of Shakespeare. Millions Needed to Continue This Humanitarian Work: Fifty Thousand Students Under Instruction in the Art of How Not to Be Poets. Against this amazing institution some of the more independent surgeons have protested. One was the late John Churton Collins, a physician who discovered that the Shakespearean metaphor was not a locally British infection rising from the Avon river, but was brought by the verbal mosquito from Rome and Greece. Collins had a vivid and audacious mind that made him one of the most readable of modern Shakespeareans, and he had, I assume, considerable learning. He says: "Dozens of impertinent emendations have been introduced into Shakespeare's text, because editors have not been aware that the custom of using the same word in different senses in one line, or even twice in contiguous lines, was deliberately affected by the Elizabethan poets." Deliberately affected? Yes, and it came natural to them in a time when language was a little looser and freer than it is after three centuries of increased use and hardened definition both in prose and poetry.