his _deliverance_ from the doom of death by
the _help_ of what friends he can find. The lion's slumbers were here
of the lightest, and happy men be our dole to have escaped with whole
skins. Thus Dr. Ingleby takes up passage after passage of Shakespeare
that has been pronounced corrupt, and shows that the fault imputed to
it lies not in the text, but in the lack of requisite knowledge, be it
of language, of usage, of manners and customs, or even of Elizabethan
spelling and grammar, on the part of the critic. The mischief that
ignorance has done in the past is irrevocable, but such impressive
warnings as Dr. Ingleby gives us may help, in both senses of the
word, in the future. We may be spared, hereafter, the infliction
of numberless "felicitous" conjectures, on which the following is
scarcely a parody. It was proposed many years ago in sport by the late
deeply-lamented Chauncey Wright, and, as far as we know, has never yet
appeared in print, though it may live to be gravely noted down in
some future Variorum, being a genuine echo of many a note by Zachary
Jackson or Andrew Beckett. In _As You Like It_ occur the familiar
lines, "And thus our life ... finds ... books in the running brooks,
sermons in stones," etc. "This is stark nonsense, and must be
remedied. Who ever found a _book_ in a _rivulet_ or a _sermon_ in
a _rock?_ It is clearly an error of a most ignorant or careless
compositor, who has transposed the nouns. Read, '_stones in the
running brooks and sermons in books_.' Sense is vindicated. Stones
are frequently found in brooks. David chose smooth _pebbles from
the brook_, and sermons are quite frequently printed and sold in a
book-form. By this restoration Shakespeare's wonderful observation
is," etc., etc., etc.

Great as is the service done in particular cases, the most valuable
part of _The Still Lion_ is the moral which it points, that
"successful emendation is the fruit of severe study and research on
the one hand, and of rare sensibility and sense on the other." And in
our opinion Dr. Ingleby might have gone even farther, and demanded for
it a spark of that creative power which is genius. But it must not be
inferred that all the difficult passages in Shakespeare can be thus
explained away. Despite all learning, or acuteness, or genius, there
remains a considerable number that have never yet been solved, and
never will be, in general acceptation, till the crack of doom. These,
however, bear so small a prop