ances of coincident suggestions,
R. H. C. indulging in two conjectures, both supported very ably, but in the
perfect unconsciousness that the first, _rude day's_, was long since
mentioned by Mr. Dyce, in his _Remarks_, 1844, p. 172., and that the
second, the change of punctuation in _All's Well that Ends Well_, is the
reading adopted by Theobald, and it is also introduced by Mr. Knight in the
text of his "National Edition," p 262., and has, I believe, been mentioned
elsewhere. It may be said that this kind of repetition might be obviated by
the publication of the various readings that have been suggested in the
text of Shakspeare, but who is there to be found Quixotic enough to
undertake so large and thankless a task, one which at best can only be most
imperfectly executed: the materials being so scattered, and often so
worthless, the compiler would, I imagine, abandon the design before he had
made great progress in it. No fair comparison can be entertained in this
respect between the text of Shakspeare and the texts of the classic
authors. What has happened to R. H. C., happens, as I am about to show, to
all who indulge in conjectural criticism.

Any reader who will take a quantity of disputed passages in Shakspeare, and
happens to be ignorant of what has been suggested by others, will discover
that, in most of the cases, if he merely tries his skill on a few simple
permutations of the letters, he will in one way or another stumble on the
suggested words. Let us take, for example, what may be considered in its
way as one of the most incomprehensible lines in Shakspeare--"Will you go,
_An-heires_?" the last word being printed with a capital. Running down with
the vowels from _a_, we get at once an apparently plausible suggestion,
"Will you go _on here_?" but a little consideration will show how extremely
unlikely this is to be the genuine reading, and that Mr. Dyce is correct in
preferring _Mynheers_--a suggestion which belongs to Theobald, and not, as
he mentions, to Hanmer. But what I maintain is, that _on here_ would be the
correction that would occur to most readers, in all probability to be at
once dismissed. MR. COLLIER, however, says "it is singular that nobody
seems ever to have conjectured that _on here_ might be concealed under
_An-heires_;" and it would have been singular had this been the case, but
the suggestion of _on here_ is to be found in Theobald's common edition.
Oddly enough, about a year before MR. CO