Sc. 1,) Mr. White prefers,
"She is not to be fasting in respect of her breath," to "She is not to
be _kissed_ fasting in respect of her breath,"--an emendation made by
Rowe,[F] and found also in Mr. Collier's Corrected Folio of 1632. We
cannot agree with him in a reading which seems to us to destroy all the
point of the passage.
[Footnote F: Mr. Dyce says the word supplied by Rowe was "fasting," a
manifest slip of the pen, and worth notice only as showing how easily
errors may be committed.]
In Dumain's ode, (_Love's Labor's Lost_, Act iv. Sc. 3,) beginning,
"On a day, (alack the day!)
Love, whose month is ever May,"
Mr. White chooses to read
"Thou, for whom Jove would swear
Juno but an Ethiop were,"
rather than accept Pope's suggestion of "ev'n Jove," or the far better
"great Jove" of Mr. Collier's Corrected Folio,--affirming that "the
quantity and accent proper to 'thou' make any addition to the line
superfluous." We should like to hear Mr. White read the verse as he
prints it. The result would be something of this kind:--
Thou-ou for whom Jove would swear,--
which would be like the 'bow-wow-wow before the Lord' of the old
country-choirs. To our ear it is quite out of the question; and,
moreover, we affirm that in dissyllabic (which we, for want of a better
name, call iambic and trochaic) measures the omission of a half-foot
is an impossibility, and all the more so when, as in this case, the
preceding syllable is strongly accented.
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