Surely the first folio is a much more correctly printed book than many of Shakspeare's editors and critics would have us believe.
H. C. K.
—— Rectory, Hereford.
The Word "clamour" in "The Winter's Tale."—Mr. Keightley complains (Vol viii., p. 241.) that some observations of mine (p. 169.) on the word clamour, in The Winter's Tale, are precisely similar to his own in Vol. vii., p. 615. Had they been so in reality, I presume our Editor would not have inserted them; but I think they contain something farther, suggesting, as they do, the A.-S. origin of the word, and going far to prove that our modern calm, the older clame, the Shakspearian clamour, the more frequent clem, Chaucer's clum, &c., all of them spring from the same source, viz. the A.-S. clam or clom, which means a band, clasp, bandage, chain, prison; from which substantive comes the verb clæmian, to clam, to stick or glue together, to bind, to imprison.
If I passed over in silence those points on which Mr. Keightley and myself agreed, I need scarcely assure him that it was for the sake of brevity, and not from any want of respect to him.
I may remark, by the way, on a conjecture of Mr. Keightley's (Vol. vii., p. 615.), that perhaps, in Macbeth, Act V. Sc. 5., Shakspeare might have written "till famine clem thee," and not, as it stands in the first folio, "till famine cling thee," that he is indeed, as he says, "in the region of conjecture:" cling is purely A.-S., as he will find in Bosworth, "Clingan, to wither, pine, to cling or shrink up; marcescere."
H. C. K.
—— Rectory, Hereford.
Three Passages in "Measure for Measure."—H. C. K. has a treacherous memory, or rather, what I believe to be the truth, he, like myself, has not a complete Shakspeare apparatus. Collier's first edition surely cannot be in his library, or he would have known that Warburton, long ago, read seared for feared, and that the same word appears in Lord Ellesmere's copy of the first folio, the correction having been made, as Mr. Collier remarks, while the sheet was at press. I however assure H. C. K. that I regard his correction as perfectly original. Still I have my doubts if seared be the poet's word, for I have never met it but in connexion with hot iron; and I should be inclined to prefer sear or sere; but this again is always physically dry, and not metaphorically so, and I fear that the true word is not to be recovered.
I cannot consent to go back with H. C. K. to the Anglo-Saxon for a sense of building, which I do not think it ever bore, at least not in our poet's time. His quotation from the "Jewel House," &c. is not to the point, for the context shows that "a building word" is a word or promise that will