When I entered on the game of criticism in "N. & Q.," I deemed that it was to be played with good humour, in the spirit of courtesy and urbanity, and that, consequently, though there might be much worthless criticism and conjecture, the result would on the whole be profitable. Finding that such is not to be the case, I retire from the field, and will trouble "N. & Q." with no more of my lucubrations.
I have been led to this resolution by the language employed by Mr. Arrowsmith in No. 189., where, with little modesty, and less courtesy, he styles the commentators on Shakspeare—naming in particular, Knight, Collier, and Dyce, and including Singer and all of the present day—criticasters who "stumble and bungle in sentences of that simplicity and grammatical clearness as not to tax the powers of a third-form schoolboy to explain." In order to bring me "within his danger," he actually transposes two lines of Shakspeare; and so, to the unwary, makes me appear to be a very shallow person indeed.
"It was gravely," says Mr. A., "almost magisterially, proposed by one of the disputants [Mr. Singer] to corrupt the concluding lines by altering their the pronoun into there the adverb, because (shade of Murray!) the commentator could not discover of what noun their could possibly be the pronoun, in these lines following:
'When great things labouring perish in their birth,
Their form confounded makes most form in mirth;'
and it was left to Mr. Keightley to bless the world with the information that it was things."
In all the modern editions that I have been able to consult, these lines are thus printed and punctuated:
"Their form confounded makes most form in mirth;
When great things labouring perish in the birth:"
and their is referred to contents. I certainly seem to have been the first to refer it to things.
Allow me, as it is my last, to give once more the whole passage as it is in the folios, unaltered by Mr. Collier's Magnus Apollo, and with my own punctuation:
"That sport best pleases, that doth least know how,
Where zeal strives to content, and the contents