'Tis strange he hides him in fresh cups, soft beds,
Sweet words; or hath moe ministers then we
That draw his knives ith' war. Well I will finde him:
For being now a favourer to the Britaine,
No more a Britaine, I have resum'd againe
The part I came in."
In the antepenultimate line, Britaine was more than a century ago changed by Hanmer into Roman, therefore retained by Warburton, again rejected by Steevens and Johnson, once more replaced by Knight and Collier, with one of his usual happy notes by the former of the two, without comment by the latter, finally left unnoticed by Dyce. My Query then is this. What amount of obtuseness will disqualify a criticaster who itches to be tinkering and cobbling the noblest passages of thought that ever issued from mortal brain, while at the same time he stumbles and bungles in sentences of that simplicity and grammatical clearness, as not to tax the powers of a third-form schoolboy to explain?[[1]] If editors, commentators,
critics, and all the countless throng who are ambitious to daub with their un-tempered mortar, or scribble their names upon the most majestic edifice of genius that the world ever saw, lack the little discernment necessary to interpret aright the above extract from Cymbeline, for the last hundred years racked and tortured in vain, let them at length learn henceforth to distrust their judgment altogether.
W. R. Arrowsmith.
P.S.—In article of No. 180. p. 353., a rather important misprint occurs, viz. date of 4to. King Richard II. with unusual title-page, which should be 1608, not 1605. Other little errors the reader may silently amend for himself.