“I was at first inclined to the opinion of the late Mr. Robinson, but maturer consideration has caused me to agree with the eloquent and erudite Jones.  There is a definite meaning in the word sixpence; and a similar error of the press in Lord Bacon’s ‘Advancement of Learning,’ where the context shows that sixpences and not sciences was the word intended, leads me to suspect that the title of his opus magnum should be De Augmentis Sixpenciarum.  Viewing the matter as a political economist, such a topic would have been more worthy of the Lord Chancellor of England; it would have been more in accordance with what we know of the character of ‘the meanest of mankind’; and the exquisite humor of the title would tally precisely with what Ben Jonson tells us in his ‘Discoveries,’ under the head Dominus Verulamius, that ’his language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious.’  Sir Thomas More had the same proneness to merriment, a coincidence the more striking as both these great men were Lord Chancellors.  A comic stroke of this description would have been highly attractive to a mind so constituted, and might easily escape the notice of a printer, who was more likely to be intent upon the literal accuracy of the Latin than on the watch for extraordinary flights of humor.”  SMITH.

But we must return from our excursion into an imaginary variorum, delightful because it requires no eyesight and no thought, to the more serious duty of examining the notes of Mr. White.  We have mentioned a single instance in which we differ with him as to the propriety of a fanatical adherence to the text of the Folio of 1623.  We differ, because we think that sense is not all that we have a right to expect from Shakspeare,—­that it is, indeed, merely the body in which his genius creates a soul of meaning, nay, oftentimes a double one, exoteric and esoteric, the spiritus astralis and the anima caelestis.  Had the passage been in verse, where the change might have damaged the rhythm, —­had it been one of those ecstasies of Shakspearian imagination, to tamper with which because we could not understand it would be Bottom-like presumption,—­one of those tempests of passion where every word reeks hot and sulphurous, like a thunderstone new-fallen,—­in any of these cases we should have agreed with Mr. White that to abstain was a duty.  But in a sentence of lightsome and careless prose, and where the chances are great that the word to be changed is the accident of the printer and not the choice of the author, we say, give us a text that is true to the context and the aesthetic instinct rather than to the Folio, even were that Pandora-box only half as full of manifest corruptions as it is.

In the “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” (Act iii.  Sc. 1,) Mr. White prefers, “She is not to be fasting in respect of her breath,” to “She is not to be kissed fasting in respect of her breath,”—­an emendation made by Rowe,[F] and found also in Mr. Collier’s Corrected Folio of 1632.  We cannot agree with him in a reading which seems to us to destroy all the point of the passage.