Thus with glad sorrow did she plain her. In th' own fair silver shines and borrow'd gold. Each line being short, I read in the first "_sweetly_ plain her," and in the second _one_ and "_fairer_ borrow'd gold," and on looking at the original 4to I found I had supplied the poet's very words. In Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose, the following line is in all the MSS. and editions, She hadde a gay mirrour, which is evidently a foot short. I read 'She had _in hand_,' and on looking at the original I found _en sa main_. It is not often that proofs have been read more carefully than were those of my edition of Milton's Poems, both by myself and by others; and yet, in the reprint of the text, in one place (Par. Lost, x. 422) it will be found that the word _to_ is missing, thus destroying the metre; and yet none of us perceived it. A far stronger case is the following. Never apparently was a work edited with greater care than Mr. Panizzi's edition of Bojardo and Ariosto; and yet in the Orlando Innamorato, II. xxiv. 54, the concluding couplet of the stanza is printed thus: Persa ho mia gioia, e'l mio bel Paradiso, Per lui che tardo giunse a darmi. Here a reader, who has even but the slightest knowledge of Italian, will see at once that the word _avviso_ has been omitted at the end of the second line; and yet this escaped not merely the printer's reader, who, even if ignorant of the language, might be supposed to have missed the rime, but the lynx-eyed editor himself, not only in the proof, but in the fair sheets which he was evidently in the habit of examining most carefully. The more I think of this error the more I feel astonished at its occurrence, a thing for which I cannot in any manner account; the following, however, is nearly a parallel. In a most carefully edited Greek Testament (Lond. 1837), in 1 Cor. xi. 23, three important words are omitted! Need we, then, wonder at omissions in Shakespeare?