I may safely leave the palpable error in As You Like It to the decision of common sense.
As I am dealing with corrections in the play of King Henry VIII., I may take occasion to observe that Mr. Collier, in his recent supplemental volume of Notes and Emendations, has, I have no doubt unwittingly, stated that a passage, Act IV. Sc. 2., has been absurdly pointed, "over and over again, from the year 1623 to our own day." Whereas it will be found corrected, exactly as it stands in his second folio, in the edition I gave of Shakspeare in 1826, with a note adverting to the absurdity of the old pointing. I may further add, that the first instance Mr. Collier gives in his preface of the corrections in his folio, is in the same predicament. He has stated that the reading of "Aristotle's cheeks" for "Aristotle's ethics," in the first scene of the Taming of the Shrew, "has been the invariable text from the first publication in 1623 until our own day;" when the fact is, that it stands properly corrected in my edition in 1826, with the following note:
"Blackstone suggests that we should read ethics, and the sense seems to require it; I have therefore admitted it into the text."
It is possible that Mr. Collier may have never looked into my edition of the poet, and I may honestly say that I regret it, not on my own account but on his, for I think, had he consulted it, his own would not have been the worse for it.
S. W. Singer.
Manor Place, South Lambeth.
MINIATURE RING OF CHARLES I.
(Vol. vi., p. 578.)
By the courtesy of W. K. Rogers, Esq. (in whose possession it is), I am enabled to account for another of these interesting and invaluable relics; one of the four said to have been presented by the Martyr prior to his execution.