CONCLUDING NOTES ON SEVERAL MISUNDERSTOOD WORDS.
(Continued from Vol. vii., p. 568.)
Not being minded to broach any fresh matter in "N. & Q.," I shall now only crave room to clear off an old score, lest I should leave myself open to the imputation of having cast that in the teeth of a numerous body of men which might, for aught they would know to the contrary, be as truly laid in my own dish. In No. 189., p. 567., I affirmed that the handling of a passage in Cymbeline, there quoted, had betrayed an amount of obtuseness in the commentators which would be discreditable in a third-form schoolboy. To substantiate that assertion, and rescue the disputed word "Britaine" henceforth for ever from the rash tampering of the meddlesome sciolist, I beg to advertise the ingenuous reader that the clause,—
"For being now a favourer to the Britaine,"
is in apposition with Death, not with Posthumus Leonatus. In a note appended to this censure, referring to another passage from L. L. L., I averred that Mr. Collier had corrupted it by chancing the singular verb dies into the plural die (this too done, under plea of editorial licence, without warning to the reader), and that such corruption had abstracted the true key to the right construction. To make good this last position, two things I must do first, cite the whole passage, without change of letter or tittle, as it stands in the Folios '23 and '32; next, show the trivial and vulgar use of "contents" as a singular noun. In Folio '23, thus:
"Qu. Nay my good Lord, let me ore-rule you now;
That sport best pleases that doth least know how.
Where Zeale striues to content, and the contents
Dies in the Zeale of that which it presents: