“Fer. There be some sports are painful; and their labour Delight in them sets off:  some kinds of baseness Are nobly undergone; and most poor matters Point to rich ends.  This, my mean task Would be as heavy to me as odious, but The mistress, which I serve, quickens what’s dead And makes my labours pleasures:  O, she is Ten times more gentle than her father’s crabbed, And he’s compos’d of harshness.  I must remove Some thousands of these logs, and pile them up Upon a sore injunction:  my sweet mistress Weeps when she sees me work, and says, such baseness Had ne’er like executor. I forget; But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labour(s), Most busy(l)est when I do it.”

The question appears to be whether “most busy” applies to “sweet thoughts” or to Ferdinand, and whether the pronoun “it” refers to the act of forgetting or to “labour(s);” and I must confess that, to me, the whole significancy of the passage depends upon the idea conveyed of the mind being “most busy” while the body is being exerted.  Every man with a spark of imagination must many a time have felt this.  In the most essential particular, therefore, I think MR. SINGER is right in his correction but at the same time agreeing with MR. COLLIER, that it is desirable not to interfere with the original text further than is absolutely necessary, I think the substitution of “labour” for “labours” is of questionable expediency.  What is the use of the conjunction “but” if not to connect the excuse for the act of forgetting with the act itself?

Without intending to follow MR. COLLIER through the course of his argument, I should like to notice one or two points.  The usage of Shakspeare’s day admitted many variations from the stricter grammatical rules of our own; but no usage ever admitted such a sentence as this,—­for though elliptically expressed, MR. COLLIER treats it as a sentence,—­

  “Most busy, least when I do it.”

This is neither grammar nor sense:  and I persist in believing that Shakspeare was able to construct an intelligible sentence according to rules as much recognised by custom then as now.

But, indeed, does not MR. COLLIER virtually admit that the text is inexplicable in his very attempt to explain it?  He sums up by saying “that in fact, his toil is no toil, and that when he is ‘most busy’ he ’least does it,’” which is precisely the reverse of what the text says, if it express any meaning at all.  I will agree with him in preferring the old text to any other text where it gives a perfect meaning; but to prefer it here, when the omission of a single letter produces an image at once {338} noble and complete, would, to my mind, savour more of superstition than true worship.

P.S.  It should be observed that MR. COLLIER’S “least” is as much of an alteration of the original text as MR. SINGER’S “busyest”, the one adding and the other omittng a letter.  The folio of 1632, where it differs front the first folio, will hardly add to the authority of MR. COLLIER himself.