of both.  The second edition is generally best, and was probably nearest to Shakespeare’s last copy, but in this passage the first is preferable; for in the folio, the messenger is sent, he knows not why, he knows not whither.  I suppose Shakespeare thought his plot opened rather too early, and made the alteration to veil the event from the audience; but trusting too much to himself, and full of a single purpose, he did not accommodate his new lines to the rest of the scene.—­The learned critic’s [Warburton] emendations are now to be examined. Scattered he has changed to scathed; for scattered, he says, gives the idea of an anarchy, which was not the case.  It may be replied that scathed gives the idea of ruin, waste, and desolation, which was not the case.  It is unworthy a lover of truth, in questions of great or little moment, to exaggerate or extenuate for mere convenience, or for vanity yet less than convenience. Scattered naturally means divided, unsettled, disunited.—­Next is offered with great pomp a change of sea to seize; but in the first edition the word is fee, for hire, in the sense of having any one in fee, that is, at devotion for money. Fee is in the second quarto changed to see, from which one made sea and another seize.

III.ii.4 (398,1) thought-executing] Doing execution with rapidity equal to thought.

III.ii.19 (399,4) Here I stand, your slave] [W:  brave] The meaning is plain enough, he was not their slave by right or compact, but by necessity and compulsion.  Why should a passage be darkened for the sake of changing it?  Besides, of brave in that sense I remember no example.

III.ii.24 (399,5) ’tis foul] Shameful; dishonourable.

III.ii.30 (399,6) So beggars marry many] i.e.  A beggar marries a wife and lice.

III.ii.46 (400,1) Man’s nature cannot carry/The affliction, nor the fear] So the folio:  the later editions read, with the quarto, force for fear, less elegantly.

III.ii.56 (401,3) That under covert and convenient seeming] Convenient needs not be understood in any other than its usual and proper sense; accommodate to the present purpose; suitable to a design. Convenient seeming is appearance such as may promote his purpose to destroy.

III.ii.53 (401,4) concealing continents] Continent stands for that which contains or incloses.

III.ii.72 (401,(5) Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart,/ That’s sorry yet for thee] Some editions read,

  —­thing in my heart;

from which Hanmer, and Dr. Warburton after him, have made string, very unnecessarily; both the copies have part.

III.ii.74 (402,7)

He that has a little tiny wit,—­ With heigh ho, the wind and the rain; Must make content with his fortunes fit, Though the rain it raineth every day]

I fancy that the second line of this stanza had once a termination that rhymed with the fourth; but I can only fancy it; for both the copies agree.  It was once perhaps written,