ible touches by which Shakspeare was content rather to hint
at, than to disclose his knowledge,--one of those effects whereby he makes
a single word supply the place of a treatise.

With these opinions, I cannot but look upon this threatened change of
_checks_ into _ethics_, as wholly unwarrantable, and I now protest against
it as earnestly as, upon a former occasion, I did against the alteration of
_sickles_ into _shekels_, or, still worse, into _cycles_ or into _circles_.
It is with great satisfaction I compare four different views taken of this
word by MR. COLLIER, viz.--in the note to the text of his octavo edition of
Shakspeare;--in an additional note in vol. i., page cclxxxiv. of that
edition;--in the first announcement of his annotated folio in the
_Athenaeum_ newspaper, Jan. 31st, 1852,--and finally (after my remarks upon
the word in "N. & Q."), his virtual reinstatement of the original _sickle_
(till then supposed a palpable and undeniable misprint) at page 46. of
_Notes and Emendations_, together with the production, _suo motu_, of an
independent reference in support of my position.

To return to this present substitution of _ethics_ for _checks_, a very
singular circumstance connected with it is the ignoring, by both MR.
COLLIER and by the critic in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, of Sir William
Blackstone's original claim to the suggestion, by prior publication of
upwards of half a century. At that time, notwithstanding the great learning
and acuteness of the proposer, the alteration was rejected! And shall we
now be less wise than our fathers? Shall we--misled by the prestige of a
few drops of rusty ink fashioned into letters of formal cut--place implicit
credence in emendations whose only claim to faith, like that of the Mormon
scriptures, is that nobody knows whence they came? {498}

In the passage I have quoted from Philemon Holland, there may be observed
two peculiarities which are generally supposed to be exclusively
Shakspearian: one is the beautiful application of the word "touch"--the
other the phrase "discourse of reason." Where this last expression occurs
in _Hamlet_, it narrowly escaped _emendation_ at the hands of Gifford! (See
Mr. Knight's note, in his illustrated edition of _Shakspeare_.) It is the
true Aristotelian [Greek: dianoia].

There is also a third peculiarity of expression in the same quotation, in
the use of the word _delay_ in the sense of _diluere_, to dilute, temper,
allay. There ar