TO THE REVEREND JOHN MITFORD. MY DEAR MITFORD, you: I HAVE two reasons for inscribing the present volume to -the first, because, in the wide range of your learning, you have not neglected the minutiae of verbal criticism; the second, because you at least will read it with a conviction that it originated in pure love to Shakespeare, and not in the desire of decrying the labours of those who have thought themselves competent to become his editors. PREFACE. HAD I committed to paper all the remarks which occurred to me during a careful perusal of Mr. Collier's and Mr. Knight's editions of Shakespeare, they would have far exceeded the limits of a single volume, -for the passages both of the text and notes, to which I found weighty objections, were, like the afflictions of Dicæopolis, ψαμμακοσιογάργαρα : even those remarks now printed form only a part of what I had actually written down; but the Publisher very reasonably disliking a bulky book, it became necessary to make the present selection, and consequently to weaken the force of my protest against those two editions. I must not be understood as if I meant to say that the same faults are always common to the editions of Mr. Collier and Mr. Knight; for, though it is my deliberate opinion that Shakespeare has suffered greatly from both, yet the one appears to me to be sometimes right where the other is wrong, and |