e enthusiasm than discrimination some of the
new readings, and showed a laudable acquaintance with the improved
version, by exchanging undoubtedly the better for the worse, upon the
authority of Mr. Collier's folio, soon after the publication of which
I had the ill-fortune to hear a popular actress destroy the effect
and meaning of one of the most powerful passages in "Macbeth" by
substituting the new for the old reading of the line,--

"What beast was it, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?"

The cutting antithesis of "What _beast_" in retort to her husband's
assertion, "I dare do all that may become a _man_," was tamely rendered
by the lady, in obedience to Mr. Collier's folio, "What _boast_ was
it, then,"--a change that any one possessed of poetical or dramatic
perception would have submitted to upon nothing short of the positive
demonstration of the author's having so written the passage.

Opinions were, indeed, divided as to the intrinsic merit of the
emendations or alterations. Some of the new readings were undoubted
improvements, some were unimportant, and others again were beyond all
controversy inferior to the established text of the passages; and it
seemed not a little difficult to reconcile the critical acumen and
poetical insight of many of the corrections with the feebleness and
prosaic triviality of others.

Again, it was observed by those conversant with the earlier editions,
especially with the little read or valued Oxford edition, that a vast
number of the passages given as emendations in Mr. Collier's folio were
precisely the same in Hanmer's text. Indeed, it seems not a little
remarkable that neither Mr. Collier nor his opponents have thought it
worth their while to state that nearly half, and that undoubtedly the
better half, of the so-called new readings are to be found in the finely
printed, but little esteemed, text of the Oxford Shakspeare. If, indeed,
these corrections now come to us with the authority of a critic but
little removed from Shakspeare's own time, it is remarkable that Sir
Thomas Hanmer's, or rather Mr. Theobald's, ingenuity should have
forestalled the _fiat_ of Mr. Collier's folio in so many instances. On
the other hand, it may have been judged by others besides a learned
editor of Shakspeare from whom I once heard the remark, that the fact of
the so-called new readings being many of them in Rowe and Hanmer, and
therefore well known to the subsequent editors of