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v u t thick spaces a r Large quods.
x . .
EndTable

p 112show.  As examples merely, and to show the possible change in sense made by a single wrong letter, I will quote one or two instances:—­

     `Were they not forc’d with those that should be ours,
      We might have met them darefull, beard to beard.’
                                   Macbeth, v. 5.[9]

     [9] Collier’s MS. corrector substituted farc’d for forc’d.

The word forced should be read farced, the letter o having evidently dropped down into a box.  The enemy’s ranks were not forced with Macbeth’s followers, but farced or filled up.  In Murrell’s Cookery, 1632, this identical word is used several times; we there see that a farced leg of mutton was when the meat was all taken out of the skin, mixed with herbs, etc., and then the skin filled up again.

     `I come to thee for charitable license . . . 
      To booke our dead.’
                                   Henry V., iv. 7.

So all the copies, but `to book’ is surely a modern commercial phrase, and the p 113Herald here asked leave simply to `look,’ or to examine, the dead for the purpose of giving honourable burial to their men of rank.  In the same sense Sir W. Lucie, in the First Part of Henry VI., says:—­

     `I come to know what prisoners thou hast tane,
          And to survey the bodies of the dead.’

We cannot imagine an officer with pen, inkhorn, and paper, at a period when few could write, `booking’ the dead.  We may, I think, take it for granted that here the letter b had fallen over into the l box.’’

Another point to bear in mind is the existence of such logotypes as fi, si, etc., so that, as Mr. Blades says, ``the change of light into sight must not be considered as a question of a single letter—­of s in the l box,’’ because the box containing si is far away from the l box, and their contents could not well get mixed.

To these instances given by Mr. Blades may be added a very interesting correction suggested to the author some years ago by a Shakespearian student.  When Isabella visits her brother in prison, the p 114cowardly Claudio breaks forth in complaint, and paints a vivid picture of the horrors of the damned:—­