"Life is like a Game of Tables," &c. (Vol. vii., p. 40.).—The sentiment is very possibly "from Jeremy Taylor," but it is not his own. It occurs in Terence's Adelphi and Plato's Commonwealth.
A. A. D.
Miscellaneous.
NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC.
The issue by the Shakspeare Society of an edition of the Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakspeare's Plays from early MS. Corrections in a Copy of the Folio 1632, in the Possession of J. Payne Collier, Esq., affords an opportunity, of which we gladly avail ourselves, to recall attention to a volume which is unquestionably the most important contribution to Shakspearian literature which has issued from the press for many years. Although we have no evidence of the authority upon which these Notes and Emendations were made, an examination of them must, we think, convince even the most sceptical, that they were made upon authority, and are not the result of clever criticism and happy conjecture. The readers of "N. & Q." know well what discussions have been raised upon such phrases as "Prenzie Angelo," "Whose mother was her painting," "Ribaudred nag," "Most busy, least when I do it," &c. The writer of the Notes and Emendations, now first published, has given in these, and hundreds of other difficult and disputed passages, corrections which are consistent with Shakspeare's character as the poet of common sense. He converts the "prenzie Angelo" into the "priestly," and the "prenzie guards" into "priestly garb." So that the passage now reads—
"Claud. The priestly Angelo.
Isab. O, 'tis the cunning livery of hell,
The damned'st body to invest and cover
In priestly garb."