"
SMITH.
But we must return from our excursion into an imaginary _variorum_,
delightful because it requires no eyesight and no thought, to the more
serious duty of examining the notes of Mr. White. We have mentioned a
single instance in which we differ with him as to the propriety of a
fanatical adherence to the text of the Folio of 1623. We differ, because
we think that sense is not all that we have a right to expect from
Shakspeare,--that it is, indeed, merely the body in which his genius
creates a soul of meaning, nay, oftentimes a double one, exoteric and
esoteric, the _spiritus astralis_ and the _anima caelestis_. Had the
passage been in verse, where the change might have damaged the rhythm,
--had it been one of those ecstasies of Shakspearian imagination,
to tamper with which because _we_ could not understand it would be
Bottom-like presumption,--one of those tempests of passion where every
word reeks hot and sulphurous, like a thunderstone new-fallen,--in any
of these cases we should have agreed with Mr. White that to abstain was
a duty. But in a sentence of lightsome and careless prose, and where the
chances are great that the word to be changed is the accident of the
printer and not the choice of the author, we say, give us a text that is
true to the context and the aesthetic instinct rather than to the Folio,
even were that Pandora-box only half as full of manifest corruptions as
it is.
In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," (Act iii.
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