for which Mr. Collier’s folio substitutes,—­

  “They all have met again,
  And all upon the Mediterranean float,
  Bound sadly back to Naples.”

Mr. Collier notices, that the improvement of giving the lines,

  “Which any print of goodness will not take,”

to Prospero, instead of Miranda, dates as far back as Dryden and Davenant’s alteration of “The Tempest,” from which he says Theobald and others copied it.

The corrected folio gives its authority to the lines of the song,—­

  “Foot it featly here and there,
  And, sweet sprites, the burden bear,”—­

which stands so in Hanmer, and, indeed is the usually received arrangement of the song.

This is the last corrected passage in the first act, in the course of which Mr. Collier gives us no fewer than sixteen, altered, emended, and commented upon in his folio.  Many of the emendations are to be found verbatim in the Oxford and subsequent editions, and three only appear to us to be of any special value, tried by the standard of common sense, to which we agreed, on Mr. Collier’s invitation, to refer them.

The line in Prospero’s threat to Caliban,—­

  “I’ll rack thee with old cramps,
  Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar,”—­

occasioned one of Mr. John Kemble’s characteristic differences with the public, who objected, perhaps not without reason, to hearing the word “aches” pronounced as a dissyllable, although the line imperatively demands it; and Shakspeare shows that the word was not unusually so pronounced, as he introduces it with the same quantity in the prose dialogue of “Much Ado about Nothing,” and makes it the vehicle of a pun which certainly argues that it was familiar to the public ear as ache and not ake.  When Hero asks Beatrice, who complains that she is sick, what she is sick for,—­a hawk, a hound, or a husband,—­Beatrice replies, that she is sick for—­or of—­that which begins them all, an ache,—­an H.  Indeed, much later than Shakspeare’s day the word was so pronounced; for Dean Swift, in the “City Shower,” has the line,—­

  “Old aches throb, your hollow tooth will
  rage.”

The opening of this play is connected with my earliest recollections.  In looking down the “dark backward and abysm of time,” to the period when I was but six years old, my memory conjures up a vision of a stately drawing-room on the ground-floor of a house, doubtless long since swept from the face of the earth by the encroaching tide of new houses and streets that has submerged every trace of suburban beauty, picturesqueness, or rural privacy in the neighborhood of London, converting it all by a hideous process of assimilation into more London, till London seems almost more than England can carry.