Sc. 2.
"Remember, son Slender, my daughter."
The word daughter, necessary both for sense and metre, was supplied by the 2nd folio.
Sc. 5.
Among the characters given in the heading of this scene, we meet Mrs. Quickly and Pistol; the 4tos have "Mrs. Quickly, like the Queen of Fairies," and prefix Quic. to the following speeches, and it is not said that Anne was to assume that character. The folio heads the speeches with Qui. and Qu. We may therefore say that the poet was oblivious when, in iv. 4. 6, he said that Anne should "present the Fairy Queen;" for throughout she only appears as an ordinary fairy, as is plain by the mistake made by Caius and Slender. The poet seems to have confined the speaking to the elder persons.
"You moonshine-revellers, and shades of night,
You orphan-heirs of fixed Destiny."
No one has been able to make any sense of 'orphan-heirs,' which may therefore be treated as a corruption. Warburton read 'ouphen-heirs,' which Singer adopts; but there is no such word as ouphen. My own opinion is that the poet wrote ouphes and heirs; and as in general the d in and is not pronounced, even before vowels, and the ou might easily be mistaken for or, the printer made orphan. The line, we may see, thus forms a parallel to the preceding line. The poet seems to have used 'heirs' in the sense of children. In Fletcher's Mad Lover we have,