We think this could not be better said, if only we might supplant “things” with the more precise word “facts”; for about things Shakspeare was never careless.  It is only that deciduous foliage of facts which every generation leaves heaps of behind it dry, and dead, that he rustles through with eyes so royally unconcerned.  As a good example of Mr. White’s style, we should be inclined to cite the Introduction to “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” from which we detach this single crystal:—­

“It is ever the ambitious way of youthful genius to aim at novelty of form in its first essays, while yet in treatment it falls unconsciously into a vein of reminiscence; afterward it is apt to return to established forms, and to show originality of treatment.”

The temptation which too easily besets an editor of Shakspeare is to differ, if possible, from everybody who has gone before him, though but as between the N.E. and N.N.E. points in the circumference of a hair.  We do not find Mr. White guilty in this respect for what he has done, but sometimes for what he has left undone in allowing the Folio text to remain.  The instance that has surprised us most is his not admitting (As You Like it, Act iv.  Sc. 1) the reading,—­“The foolish coroners of that age found it was Hero of Sestos,” instead of the unmeaning one, “chroniclers.”  He has been forced, for the sake of sense, to make some changes in the Folio text which seem to us quite as violent, and we cannot help thinking that the gain in aptness of phrase and coherence of meaning would have justified him in doing as much here.  He admits, in his note on the passage, that the change is “very plausible”; but adds, “If we can at will reduce a perfectly appropriate and uncorrupted word of ten letters to one of eight, and strike out such marked letters as h, l, and e, we may re-write Shakspeare at our pleasure.”  Mr. White has already admitted that “chroniclers” is not perfectly appropriate in admitting that the change is “very plausible”; and he has no right to assume that the word is uncorrupted,—­for that is the very point in question.  As to the disparity in the number of letters, no one familiar with misprints will be surprised at it; and Mr. Spedding, in the edition of Bacon already referred to, furnishes us with an example of blunder[E] precisely the reverse, in which one word of eight letters is given for two of ten, (sciences for six princess,)—­the printer in both cases having set up his first impression of what the word was for the word itself.  Had this occurred in Shakspeare, instead of Bacon, we should have had a series of variorum notes like this:—­

[Footnote E:  Bacon’s Works, by Ellis, Spedding, & Heath.  Vol.  III. p. 303, note.]

“That sixpence was the word used by our author scarcely admits of doubt.  From a number of parallel passages we select the following:—­