As this error never occurs in Jonson and Massinger, and only, I believe, in the instance given above in Beaumont and Fletcher, and has no æsthetic advantage or beauty to recommend it, it seems quite absurd to suppose that Shakespeare, whose vocabulary was the largest of all, and whose ear was so fine and correct, should have found pleasure in it. Surely a just critic will sooner lay the blame on the printer and the careless editors, very different in this respect from those of Beaumont and Fletcher, who seem never to have hesitated to correct an error when they discovered it.
The resemblance in form above alluded to is of great importance, under the name of ductus literarum, in the eyes of Mr. Dyce, and it should always be attended to; for it is usually caused by the attempt of the printer to make out illegible writing. The following are striking instances:—
In Peele's Edward I. these lines occur.
To calm, to qualify, and to compound,
Thank England's strife of Scotland's climbing peers.
That the last line is nonsense was clear to every one; but no critic ever could emend it. The true reading, however, is doubtless The enkindled, which flashed suddenly on my mind one time when I was considering the passage. It was probably the resemblance of sound chiefly that misled the printer.
At the end of Marston's Insatiate Countess we meet the following unmeaning line,
Like Missermis cheating of the brack,
which Steevens corrected most happily thus—
Like Mycerinus cheating of the oracle,