He says, in the Advertisement prefixed to
his second volume, "that in every case, where no such credit is
given for a restoration, a conjecture, or a quotation, the editor is
responsible for it; and as he is disinclined to the giving of much
prominence to claims of this sort, he has, in those cases, merely
remarked, that 'hitherto' the text has stood thus or so." We have not
been at the trouble of verifying every one of Mr. White's "hithertos,"
but we did so in two plays, and found in "Midsummer Night's Dream" four,
and in "Much Ado" two cases, where the reading claimed as a restoration
occurred also in Mr. Knight's excellent edition of 1842. These
oversights do not affect the correctness of Mr. White's text, but they
diminish our confidence in the accuracy of the collation to which he
lays claim.
The chief objection which we have to make against Mr. White's text is,
that he has perversely allowed it to continue disfigured by vulgarisms
of grammar and spelling. For example, he gives us _misconster_, and
says, "This is not a mis-spelling or loose spelling of 'misconstrue,'
but the old form of the word." Mr. Dyce insisted on the same
cacographical nicety in his "Remarks" on the editions of Mr. Collier and
Mr. Knight, but abandons it in his own with the artless admission that
_misconstrue_ also occurs in the Folio. In one of the Camden Society's
publications is a letter from Friar John Hylsey to Thomas Cromwell, in
which we find "As God is my jugge";[H] but we do not believe that _jug_
was an old form of _judge_, though a philological convict might fancy
that the former word was a derivative of the latter.
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