It really does appear to me that there could not be a happier or more appropriate designation, for a philosophy made up in this way of "meanes" and adjustments, so as to steer between the plus and minus, than a system of checks—not fixed, or rigid rules, as they are sometimes interpreted to be, but nice allowances of excess or defect, to be discovered, weighed, and determined by individual reason, in the audit of each man's conscience, according to the strength or weakness of the passions he may have to regulate.
I therefore oppose the substitution of ethics—
1. Because we have the primâ facie evidence of the text itself, that checks was Shakspeare's word.
2. Because we have internal evidence, in the significance and excellence of the phrase, that it was Shakspeare's word.
Ethics was the patent title by which Aristotle's moral philosophy was universally known; therefore any ignoramus, who never dipped beyond the title, might, and would, have used it. But no person, except one well read in the philosophy itself, would think of giving it such a designation as checks; which word, nevertheless, is most happily characteristic of it.
3. Because, as before stated, Aristotle's checks, being the restrictive and regulating portion of Aristotle's Ethics, is necessarily a more diametrical antithesis to Ovid (and his laxities).
4. Because I look upon the use of this phrase as one of those nice and scarcely perceptible touches by which Shakspeare was content rather to hint at, than to disclose his knowledge,—one of those effects whereby he makes a single word supply the place of a treatise.
With these opinions, I cannot but look upon this threatened change of checks into ethics, as wholly unwarrantable, and I now protest against it as earnestly as, upon a former occasion, I did against the alteration of sickles into shekels, or, still worse, into cycles or into circles. It is with great satisfaction I compare four different views taken of this word by Mr. Collier, viz.—in the note to the text of his octavo edition of Shakspeare;—in an additional note in vol. i., page cclxxxiv. of that edition;—in the first announcement of his annotated folio in the Athenæum newspaper, Jan. 31st, 1852,—and finally (after my remarks upon the word in "N. & Q."), his virtual reinstatement of the original sickle (till then supposed a palpable and undeniable misprint) at page 46. of Notes and Emendations, together with the production, suo motu, of an independent reference in support of my position.
To return to this present substitution of ethics for checks, a very singular circumstance connected with it is the ignoring, by both Mr. Collier and by the critic in the Gentleman's Magazine, of Sir William Blackstone's original claim to the suggestion, by prior publication of upwards of half a century. At that time, notwithstanding the great learning and acuteness of the proposer, the alteration was rejected! And shall we now be less wise than our fathers? Shall we—misled by the prestige of a few drops of rusty ink fashioned into letters of formal cut—place implicit credence in emendations whose only claim to faith, like that of the Mormon scriptures, is that nobody knows whence they came?