1623, of which it was, in my opinion most justly, said by the late Mr. Hunter, that "perhaps in the whole annals of English typography there is no record of any book of any extent and any reputation having been dismissed from the press with less care and attention;" while Mr. Knight (who ought to have known a good deal about such matters) boldly declares that "perhaps, all things considered, there never was a book so correctly printed!" Such as it is, however, it and the previous 4to impressions are the _only_ authority we have for the text of these marvellous creations of the human intellect. 2. Few, I should hope, will refuse to assent to the two following postulates. I. No eminent writer--however he might obscure his meaning by metaphor, ellipsis, or other figures of speech--has ever written pure nonsense. II. No true poet ever wrote limping, imperfect, or inharmonious verses. We may add to these the plain facts, that printers are not, and never were, infallible, and that those works of which the authors themselves read the proof-sheets are in general more correct than those of which those sheets were read by others. 3. Now the plays of Shakespeare are, as is well known, full of passages of which it is nearly impossible to make any good sense, and they abound in imperfect and inharmonious verses. On the other hand, the poems of Venus and Adonis, and of Lucrece, which he himself probably saw through the press, are almost entirely free from error, and do not contain a single unmelodious verse. The natural inference, then, is, that the defects of the plays are all owing to the transcribers and printers, and that the correction of them and the restoration of sense and melody, when possible, is the legitimate office of sound emendatory criticism. The truth of this has been felt from the very beginning; for in the 2nd folio, published in 1632, only nine years after the first, there are numerous corrections, which must have been made by the editor solely on his own authority, for, many of them being very bad, he could not have derived them from any manuscripts. And the same is the case in the subsequent folios, of all of which there are many copies in existence, like that which Mr. Collier met with to his misfortune, and which has excited such a storm in a puddle,--of which, by the way, my own opinion is that the corrections in it were made between 1744, the date of Hanmer's, and 1765, that of Johnson's edition; whence I only cite it for the corrections later than the former date. These contain manuscript corrections, some, like that copy, anonymously, others by Southern and other men of repute. In the beginning of the last century Rowe gave the first example of an annotated edition of Shakespeare's works, and from that time to the present edition has succeeded edition bearing the names of critics of various degrees of ability and eminence, but all agreeing in the necessity of revising the text and