sacredness about every line and letter of that volume. Its punctuation, barbarous and riotous as it is, and its uncouth orthography, too, may often suggest plausible construction of doubtful passages, and its very errors are of value because conveying a clue to the resolution of cruces found otherwhere in the volume and due to the like "iniurious ftealthes" of the type-setters. There is, in short, no one book on the student's shelves to which he must oftener have recourse. And, unless he has, as the outcome of long years of patient reading and collation, gotten the volume almost by heart, and acquired the knack of putting his finger readily upon any given passage, I, with all earnestness, venture to say that there is no book of reference extant in which it is harder for him to find his place, unless it be a quarto of one of the plays.

Opportunity to consult the First Folio text has been much facilitated by means of reprints of more or less accuracy and more or less popular in character. There are at the present time four accessible reproductions of the whole work, which claim to be in fac-simile, although none of them is absolutely

so.

The first attempt was made in 1807, under the editorship of Francis Douce, a genial and painstaking student. Elaborate preparations were made for the work, a special paper being contributed by Whatman with the name of "Shakespeare and the date "1806" distinctly watermarked. The typographical peculiarities of the original are preserved, even to the errors, as well as was practicable without possessing the identical and badly mixed fonts from which Jaggard and Blount printed their Folio. The title-page with the Droeshout portrait was re-engraved with great care, and so faithfully has the Face been "writ in braffe" that several imperfect copies of the genuine title have been pieced from the Douce reprint. The volume was issued in 1807 by E. & J. Wright, and was heralded as immaculate; but it soon fell into somewhat undeserved disrepute though the laborious effort of William Upcott, of the London Institution, Moorfields, who, at the instigation of the devil and of Professor Porson, devoted 145 days of close atten

tion to a minute collation of the reprint with a copy of the First Folio. His purpose would not seem to have been wholly disinterested, for we first find him coyly dallying with the greatly alarmed booksellers, to one of whom, Arch of Cornhill, he parted with his list of 368 errata in exchange for a fresh copy of the "pretended" reprint, and thereafter he is discovered hawking the copy so acquired, with all the errata fairly written with a pen, for six guineas-not, truly, a munificent recompense for his "four months and twenty-three days" of misapplied toil which, as we learn from his note in the corrected volume,* ended "Jan. 28, 1809, at three minutes past 12 o'clock." Upcott's copy, with his collations, is according to Dr. J. P. Norris,† in the library of Horace Howard Furness, in Philadelphia, and in a recent letter to me Mr. Furness confirms the statement.

As is shown by a later writer in Notes and Queries,‡ only about forty of the errors detected by Upcott have any marked influence upon the text, and of these only half, or less, can be dignified as "readings." The work, of which 250 copies were printed, has become almost as infrequent as a genuine First Folio, and, except in the larger libraries, is inaccessible to the common student.

In 1862-64, Mr. Lionel Booth put forth the well-known typereduction of the 1623 Folio. The Cambridge Editors say of it, "It is probably the most correct reprint ever issued." Equal precautions against error were probably never before taken. Trustworthy report traces up, through Mr. Sabin, of New York, the assurance of Mr. Booth himself that the proof-sheets had been submitted to the eight best proof-readers in London before they were struck off. The Droeshout portrait, the head ornaments, tail-pieces and initial letters are photo-engraved reductions; the rest is simply reprinted, closely imitating most, but not all, of the typographical peculiarities of the original, even to broken letters, "wrong-font" types, "space-up," etc. But there it stops. The form of the reduced square-quarto *Notes and Queries, Series I., vol. vii., p. 47. + Article in American Bibliopolist, June, 1875. Notes and Queries, Series III., vol. vii., p. 139.

page, which is broader in proportion than the Folio, and the "face" of the much smaller type, do not suggest the appearance of the original volume.

The claim to accuracy of the Booth reprint is deservedly high. The publishers, in 1864, on issuing the third part containing the Tragedies, announced "that no errors have been pointed out which have not, on examination, proved to have been errors, or misconceptions, on the part of the critics." And more than twenty years of crucial study, such as no volume of like size and pretensions has ever before undergone, have left its substantial accuracy unimpaired. There are unquestionably variations here and there from original copies and from the later photo-lithographic reproductions; none however, of any importance have been, so far as is known, fixed upon the reprint. And these variations, insignificant as they are, do not necessarily impute want of exactness to the proof-readers of Booth's text, for individual copies of the First Folio differ among themselves more widely than the Booth reprint does from any one of them. Collation of many among the three or four hundred copies of the Folio known to exist indicates that, like most of the books of its time, it suffered correction while passing through the press, and suggests its existence, according to Dr. Ingleby, in at least three states, which he designates as being respectively, of the First, Second and Third Periods.* let me say, that all copies of the first Fo. fall into three

classes. "The earliest have a peculiar pagination of the Histories, and two mis prints in III. Henry VI. :

P. 153 is misprinted 163.

P. 164 is misprinted 154.

Also (but not peculiar to these)

165 (is misprinted) 167.

166 (is misprinted) 168.

And on P. 172, col. 2 (i.e. III. Hen. VI., V. 7, 25 and 27) and is misprinted add, and kis is misprinted 'tis.

"The next later issue has these two misprints also; and

P. 165 is misprinted 167, and

P. 166 is misprinted 168

but it has not the two errors of pagination already specified as peculiar to the earliest issue.

Now, we do not know, by authoritative announcement, what particular copy was followed by Booth's proof-readers, nor, indeed, whether a simple copy of the original was adhered to throughout. By Dr. Ingleby's test, it would seem to have been taken from a Third Period copy, such as is the Grenville copy in the British Museum.

Speaking of the variations of the genuine copies of the First Folio, the Cambridge Editors go so far as to say: "It is probable that no one copy exactly corresponds with any other copy," although the discrepancy may often be "in a single letter only." It is, therefore, a fact that, in speaking of the Folio of 1623, we have no one acknowledged standard to which the varia lectiones of different copies may be referred, and this is equally true of the reprints as of the originals.

A careful collation which I have had occasion to make of one play, King Lear, with Staunton's photo-lithographic reproduction, has strongly exemplified the inconvenience of lacking a standard of reference. A score of differences, thus noted, are reduced by comparison with a copy of the original (Mr. Furness's) to only four, one literal, and three of punctuation. On page 292, column 1, line 6, Booth's reprint reads "King. and instead of "King, and" as in the original. On page 293, column 2, line 18 from the bottom, "eyes, but " should be "eyes. but". On page 301, column 1, penultimate line, "Yours, in" should be "Yours in." And on page 309, column 2, about half way down, the stage-direction "He dies." should read either" He dis." (Staunton's) "He dis." (Capell's copy, cit. Cambridge Editors), or "Hedis." (Furness's copy). There is nothing to prevent the reprint from agreeing with the original followed by Booth's proof-readers, and in the absence

"The latest issue has 'and' "kis,' and I have found a perfect uniformity of paging and mispaging in all the copies that have those two words correctly. . Lord Ellesmere's copy belongs to the Second Period; the Grenville and other B. M. copies belong to the Third Period. These may serve as typical copies." (Letter of C. M. Ingleby to S. A. Allibone, Nov. 8, 1879, quoted in Lenox Library Cat. Works of Sh., 1880, p. 33.)

of knowledge of the precise copy used by them, no positive charge of error can be brought against their work.

A good illustration of this point is found on page 299 of the Folio, column 2, Scena Sceptima, line 2, where Booth's text gives "hin," while Staunton's, and several copies of the original, kindly collated for me by Mr. Albert R. Frey, read "him." But Mr. Furness, to whose considerate aid I am much indebted, informs me that his copy reads "hin," like Booth's.

The third and most ambitious of the reprints, and the only one rationally deserving the name of "fac-simile," appeared in 1866, under the supervision of Mr. Howard Staunton. It is a photo-lithograph, admirably executed, as such work ran twenty years ago, by R. W. Preston, and was announced to be made from the Ellesmere copy in Bridgewater House and from "copies " in the National Library (British Museum). As there are three copies of the 1623 Folio in the British Museum-the Grenville copy (of the Third Period), that in the Royal Library of George III., and one formerly belonging to the Rev. Mordaunt Chacherode (the Period of which I have not yet ascertained) *—there may possibly be uncertainty that the Staunton fac-simile is not patchworked from four copies of the original, although Winsor says that it was photo-lithographed from two only-the Ellesmere and Grenville copies-"taking a page from one or the other, where its condition best answered his purpose." It is, at any rate, quite uncertain from which copy any particular page is reproduced. This is unfortunate, in view of the different Periods combined, and the many discrepancies between known copies. For this reason alone, Staunton's can never be a universally acceptable standard.

Moreover, despite its inconvenience because representing to the eye the size and "typographical phenomena " of the genuine Folio page, the Staunton fac-simile is not perfect. Photolithography has never been a perfected art. What between the eccentricities of the wet-collodion film and the irregularities of the process of transference from the negative to the stone through the medium of a print in unctuous ink, there is an un* Winsor's Sh. Bibliography, Boston, 1876, p. 80!