This task Mr. White has undertaken, and, after such conscientious examination of his work as the importance of it demands, after a painful comparison, note by note, and reading by reading, of his edition with those of Messrs. Knight, Collier, and Dyce, our opinion of his ability and fitness for his task has been heightened and confirmed.  Not that we always agree with him,—­not that we do not think that in respect of the Folio text he has sometimes erred on the side of superstitious reverence for it, and sometimes in too rashly abandoning it,—­but, making all due exceptions, we think that his edition is, in the phrase of our New England fathers in Israel, for substance, scope, and aim, the best hitherto published.  The chief matter must in all cases be the text, and the faults we find in him do not, as a general rule, affect that.  Some of them are faults which his own better judgment, we think, will lead him to avoid in his forthcoming volumes; and in regard to some, he will probably honestly disagree with us as to their being faults at all.  No conceivable edition of Shakspeare would satisfy all tastes;—­sometimes we have attached associations to received readings which make impartial perception impossible; sometimes we have imparted our own meaning to a passage by too steady pondering over it, just as in twilight an inanimate thing will seem to move, if we look at it long, though the wavering be truly in our own overstrained vision; sometimes our personal temperament will insensibly warp our judgment;—­but Mr. White has generally shown so just a discrimination, that there are few instances where we dissent, and in these a pencil will enable every one to edit for himself.  Any criticism of an edition of Shakspeare must necessarily concern itself with seemingly insignificant matters, often with a comma or a syllable,—­and the danger is always of degenerating into a captiousness and word-catching unworthy the lover of truth for its own sake.  We shall endeavor to be minute without being small.

Mr. White reserves for a first volume (not yet published) his notices of Shakspeare’s life, his remarks upon the text, and other general introductory topics.  In the second volume, he gives us an excellent copy of the Droeshout portrait, the preliminary matter of the Folio of 1628, with notices of the writers of commendatory verses thereto prefixed, and of the principal actors who performed parts in Shakspeare’s plays.  We notice particularly his discussion of the authorship of the verses signed J.M.S. as a good example of the delicacy and acuteness of his criticism.  Though he has the great authority of Coleridge against him, we think that he has constructed a very ingenious, strong, and even convincing argument against the Milton theory.  Each play is preceded by an Introduction, remarkably well digested and condensed, giving an account of the text, and of the sources from which Shakspeare helped himself to plots or incidents.  We cannot but commend highly the self-restraint which