-ED.]

_Emendations of Shakspeare._--I am sadly afraid, what with one annotator
and another, that we, in a very little time, shall have Shakspeare so
modernised and weeded of his peculiarities, that he will become a very
second-rate sort of a person indeed; for I now see with no little alarm,
that one of his most delightful quaintnesses is to give way to the march of
refinement, and be altogether ruined. Hazlitt, one the most original and
talented of critics, has somewhere said, that there was not in any passage
of Shakspeare any single word that could be changed to one more
appropriate, and as an instance he gives a passage from _Macbeth_, which
certainly is one of the most perfect and beautiful to be found in the whole
of his works:

"This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, buttress,
Nor coin of vantage, but this bird hath made
His pendent bed, and procreant cradle: where they
Most breed and haunt, I have observed, the air
Is delicate."

There are some who differ from Hazlitt in the present day, and assert that
there is an error in the press in Dogberry's reproof of Borachio for
calling him an "ass." The passage as it stands is as follows:

"I am a wise fellow; and which is more, an officer, and which is more,
a _householder_, and which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any
is in Messina, and one that knows the law, go to; and a rich fellow
enough, go to; and a fellow that hath had _losses_, and one that hath
two gowns, and everything handsome about him."

His having had losses evidently meaning, though he was then poor, that his
circumstances were at one time so prosperous, that he could afford to
_bear_ losses; and he, even then, had a superfluity of wardrobe in "two
gowns, and everything handsome about him." But this little word _losses_,
the perfect Shakspearian quaintness of which is universally acknowledged,
is to be changed into _leases_; if it should be _leases_, how is it that it
does not follow upon "householder," instead of being introduced so many
words after? as, if _leases_ were the proper word, it would assuredly have
suggested itself immediately as an additional item to his respectability as
a householder: for a momen