"is't not severe." This smacks very decidedly of more modern times—and is a marked instance of our corrector's attempt to popularise his author. "Not square" of course means not just.
Julius Cæsar—Act I. Scene 2.—In his comments on the corrections of this play Mr Collier makes an unfortunate commencement. He says, "The two following lines have always been printed thus—
'When could they say, till now, that talked of Rome,
That her wide walks encompass'd but one man?'
This reading has never, we believe, been doubted." No man can be expected to have examined all the editions of Shakespeare. But surely Mr Collier might have been acquainted with Theobald's (1773), and the common variorum (1785), in both of which "walls" is printed in the text, without a word of comment, as requiring none. Or if he had not examined these editions, surely his remark was somewhat precipitate that "walks" had been always printed in the text, and had never been doubted. We have never seen an edition containing "walks"—but we shall not venture to assert that no such edition exists. This, however, is certain, that the change of "walks" "into walls" is news at least a hundred years old, and is a correction which every child would make the instant the passage was laid before him.
We quote the following from Mr Collier for the sake of the remark with which it concludes. "The MS. corrector," he says, "requires us to make another change which seems even less necessary, but, at the same time, is judicious.
'Brutus had rather be a villager,
Than to repute himself a son of Rome,
Under these hard conditions as this time
Is like to lay upon us.'
Under such hard conditions, sounds better, followed as it is by 'this time,' but this is perhaps a matter of discretion, and we have no means of knowing whether the writer of the notes might not here be indulging his taste." This implies—and there are many such insinuations throughout Mr Collier's book—that we have the means of knowing that the corrector did not exercise merely his own discretion, in the majority of his emendations, but had undoubted authority for his cutting and carving on the text. But what means have we of knowing this? None at all. Sometimes the corrector restores the readings of the old quartos and of the folio 1623; but that is no proof that his other corrections have any guarantee beyond his own caprice. There is no external evidence in their favour, and their manifest inferiority to the received text, in almost every instance of importance, shows that their internal evidence is just as defective. Indeed, as we shall by and by see, we have the means of knowing that, in almost every case, the old corrector was "exercising merely his own discretion," or rather indiscretion. We admit that in a few minor instances the changes are slightly for the better, as, for instance, the alteration of "make" into mark in these lines (Act II. Scene 1)—
"This shall mark
Our purpose necessary, and not envious."
But wherever our corrector attempts an emendation of any magnitude, he, for the most part—indeed, we may say always—signally fails, as has been already abundantly shown; and he fails, because in nine hundred and ninety-nine apparently doubtful cases out of every thousand, the text stands in no need of any alteration.
Act III. Scene 1.—How vilely vulgarised is Cæsar's answer to Artemidorus by the corrector's way of putting it. Artemidorus, pressing forward to deliver his warning to Cæsar, says,
"Mine's a suit
That touches Cæsar nearer."
Cæsar's dignified answer is,
"What touches us ourself, shall be last served."
The words put into his mouth by the MS. corrector are,
"That touches us? ourself shall be last served."
The taste of this new reading will not find many approvers, we should think, when it is placed in juxtaposition with the old.
Perhaps the corrector is right in giving the words, "Are we all ready," to Casca, instead of Cæsar, to whom they are usually assigned; but Ritson had long ago pointed out the propriety of the change. We can accept crouch-
