Clearly, we
should be grateful to an editor who feels it his chief duty to scrape
away these barnacles from the brave old hull, to replace with the
original heart-of-oak the planks where these small but patient
terebrators have bored away the tough fibre to fill the gap with
sawdust!
This task Mr. White has undertaken, and, after such conscientious
examination of his work as the importance of it demands, after a painful
comparison, note by note, and reading by reading, of his edition with
those of Messrs. Knight, Collier, and Dyce, our opinion of his ability
and fitness for his task has been heightened and confirmed. Not that we
always agree with him,--not that we do not think that in respect of the
Folio text he has sometimes erred on the side of superstitious reverence
for it, and sometimes in too rashly abandoning it,--but, making all
due exceptions, we think that his edition is, in the phrase of our New
England fathers in Israel, for substance, scope, and aim, the best
hitherto published. The chief matter must in all cases be the text, and
the faults we find in him do not, as a general rule, affect that. Some
of them are faults which his own better judgment, we think, will lead
him to avoid in his forthcoming volumes; and in regard to some, he will
probably honestly disagree with us as to their being faults at all. No
conceivable edition of Shakspeare would satisfy all tastes;--sometimes
we have attached associations to received readings which make impartial
perception impossible; sometimes we have imparted our own meaning to
a passage by too steady pondering over it, just as in twilight an
inanimate thing will seem to move, if we look at it long, though the
wavering be truly in our own overstrained vision; sometimes our personal
temperament will insensibly warp our judgment;--but Mr.
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