or perchance a single word, which the behest of criticism demands to be accurately rendered. This is especially the case with the Shakespearian student-for if he be not content to take all his knowledge at second hand-if he be not willingly led by the guide-blind or purblind, it may be-whose hand first grasps his own-if he be ever so slightly devoted to that most enticing and exacting of all branches of critical study which deals with textual intricacies, and which spreads out in review all the opulent stores of philological science in the search for the one bit needed to fit, mosaic-wise, into the finished work -he is at each moment driven to ransack the original authorities, in whatever form they may be accessible to him.

One of the most helpful and hopeful phases of modern critical science is the steady progress toward supplying trustworthy authorities for this class of study. A century ago, the few who realized the need of comparative research among conflicting texts, had little more than happy accident to depend upon, according as fate kindly set in their way, or unkindly withheld, some musty folio or wormy quarto, where, in a passage affording a perfect parallelism of sense, lay the very word required to solve a doubt. To-day, our shelves are crowded with reprints, aiming at an ever-increasing accuracy of reproduction and collation. The labor of learned associations, the Camden, the Percy, the Early English Text, and the Old and New Shakespeare Societies, has been supplemented by the arduous toil, and too often the material sacrifices, of individuals who, like Arber and Grosart, reproduce the treasures of ancient bookdom, until the most casual investigator of our time is far better equipped off-hand than were the Theobalds and Malones, the Steevens and Giffords, of three or four score years since.

With the abundance of material, a nicer dependence upon selection and an accurate use of it becomes more and more imperative. The day of slipshod emendation, of silent adaptation ("convey, the wise it call"), and of unathorized revision, is gone by. The student has not only the indefeasible right, but the increasing opportunity to follow step by step the process by which a given critical text of Shakespeare is formed, and bear

the testimony of his own good judgment to the soundness of the result, or to revert, himself, to the fountain-heads of authority and weigh equalities with judicial severity.

True, some of the most eminent teachers of Shakespeare hold that it is no business of the student-reader to be studious; that the relation between them is necessarily that of master and disciple, of preceptor and neophyte, not of guide and co-worker. Leo says of the duty of an editor of an ideally perfect text that "Every passage that has succeeded in establishing its title to respect, either by the agreement of the old editions or of later emendators, should be adopted in the text, without the slightest mention of all the arguments for and against, which have hitherto been bandied about respecting it. The mention of them is not of the least advantage to the public, and does not at all advance the purification of the text."* Hudson, peace be with his soul, in his hard-headed, brawny-handed way, lays about him right and left in this wise: "If any one says that common readers, such as at least ninety-nine persons out of a hundred are and must be, should have the details and processes of the work put before them, that so they may be enabled to form independent judgments for themselves-I say, whoever talks in this way is either under a delusion himself, or else means to delude others. It may flatter common readers to be told that they are just as competent to judge for themselves in these matters as those are who have made a life-long study of them; but the plain truth is, that such readers must perforce either take the results of deep scholarship on trust, or else not have them at all; and none but a dupe or a quack, or perhaps a compound of the two, would ever think of representing the matter otherwise."t

Such utterances alike deny the right and refuse the opportunity of general critical study, by summarily crowding the many who enjoy and seek to understand Shakespeare into the herd of "common readers." Therein lies the fallacy, for the reader of Shakespeare is rarely of the common classes to whom Hudson

F. A. Leo. Coriolanus, 1864, p. vi. + Hudson's Sh. Boston, 1881, Vol. I.,

p. xvi.

addresses himself. The interest to follow the wonder-working Magician through the rush and clash of his metaphor, to be lifted up with him toward the unapproachable and descend with him into the deepest depths of the human soul-and the consciousness that, while it is the voice of a god that speaks, it is a voice that makes us co-heirs of its godhood as it in turn shares the infirmities of our manhood-do not belong to the common reader. Shakespeare is not readable in the same way that a morning newspaper or a society novel is. We read him somehow as we do the Bible, with reverence and faith. And it is just here that the dogmatic teachers go astray; they hold that the Shakespearian canon and text are to be regarded with awe, that not one jot or tittle is to be disturbed, overlooking that it is often their own canon, the mundane creation of their own emendatory judgment, that they set up and into the divinity of which they would forbid the scrutiny of the common scholar. For we have no Shakespearian canon. coming down to us with all the sanction of centuries of undisturbed completeness, and made, through daily association from earliest childhood, the occasion of exposition and comment until its phraseology and inmost import become so woven into our lives that it is a recognizable and immutable standard, as is the case with the Bible. We seem to read the Bible without effort or conscious analysis, until we fancy that its truths come home to us of their own force without exegesis or gloss-but we lose sight of the potential traditions of accumulated early associations, that cling around every familiar word and image, and insensibly aid in building up the meaning into a connected whole. We do not pause to recall, if indeed we ever heeded, the fierce dissensions of the scholiasts as to the right or wrong translation of the words or their title even, to a place in the sacred text-the sonorous English of King James' revisers is for us the Bibleword, fresh and unalterable from the lips of Deity-and its meaning is that which our fathers and mothers gave it. With such traditional and venerable sanctity attaching to a canonical text. it is easy to comprehend the feeling of shrinking pain, the sensation of being, as it were, passive spectators of a sacrilege,

with which the masses look upon the late Revised Version. Not even the hands of those who guide the Ark of the Covenant may be put forth to touch it with impunity, though it be to steady it.

Not without amusement could we fancy as many Bibles as editors of the text-some with the Apocryphal books, some without, some eclectically made up from both sources-here an important doctrinal passage omitted, there another inserted, as the varying codices might permit or the erratic predilection of the editors suggest-now the Talmudic legends used to elucidate the Scriptures, now the Avesta Zend or the Koran cited to illustrate the assumed common origin of some dogma or parable; and therewithal the wildest latitude of verbal alteration and structural adaptation, apparently obeying no other criterion than the announcement of the editor that "Moses undoubtedly meant to say thus and thus," or, "Whatever the scribe may have seemed to make Isaiah say, he could never have intended to write nonsense." Imagine our reverence and faith pinned upon a Bible. that had undergone successive editings by Warburton, Pope, and Johnson, elaborate textual criticism by half a score of Beckets and Zachary Jacksons, and wholesale emendations after the whim of the "Old Corrector" of some Perkins-Collier codex. Might not the common reader who took interest enough in such a text to follow it, endeavor to fathom its problems for himself and weigh probabilities in the balance of his own judgment, even to the extent of rashly venturing on some neat little conjecture of his own?

It is probably too late to hope for the adoption of a Shakespeare text to which the masses may give belief and respect in something the same way they have done to the King James version. Two centuries of editing-God save the mark-have familiarized mankind with the process as far as Shakespeare is concerned, while the absence of such editing for three centuries during which the English language has grown around the Holy Book itself, as it were, thrusting its tendrils into the very substance of it and sucking thence revivifying strength, has made the Bible a thing beyond light change. But is it too late also

to hope for a Shakespearian canon so firmly fixed and so generally accepted as to make it as rash to foist Edward III. or the Two Noble Kinsmen into the series of plays as it would be to include Maccabees, Tobias, or Baruch in some new edition of the Scriptures? If individual whim or reliance upon the application of some abstrusely arbitrary test is to determine-from time to time, with varying results according as the old test varies or new tests are devised—what is or is not Shakespeare, may we not look for some edition in the near future with Mucedorus, Faire Em, or Arden of Feversham cheek by jowl with Timon or Cymbeline-and should we be more tolerant toward such an innovation than our fast traditions forbids us to be to the inclusion in the Sacred Canon of the sublime morality of Jesus, Son of Sirach, or the rich poesy of The Book of Wisdom?

It is evident that a Shakespearian canon of some kind is needed by scholars, and if nothing more can be done-if no Council of Laodicea be practicable-let the consensus of two centuries constrain us to adhere with some show of reverence to the First Folio, with perhaps the addition of Pericles from the Third Folio. A fairly safe canon is found in the First Folio, for Heminge and Condell were something more than accidental editors or interested holders of floating copyrights-they were fellow-actors with Shakespeare, partners with him in his venture of the "Gloabe on the Bancke-side," and presumably as competent as any men then to be found in King James' England to announce what plays were legitimately owned by the Company and received and acted by them and their associates in the firm belief of the Shakespearian authorship and under the sanction of the Shakespearian name. Canon or not, in the strict sense of the term, the 1623 Folio is our only warrant for thirty-six dramatic compositions of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean age, under the authentication of a competent and legitimately interested authority, which certifies to them as Shakespeare's.

No wonder, then, that this Folio should be the object of especial veneration. There is, to the true Shakespearian, a