Your sultry springs, through every urn.
Here I at once corrected salutary, and on looking at the original edition I found I was right. Yet, had this correction been made in Shakespeare, we know how it would have been disputed. As to omissions I can give the following instances. In a reprint (Lond. 1816) of Fletcher's Purple Island, we find (xii. 74, 85) the following lines:
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,