Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 074.djvu/326

320, referring to the poverty of the plebeians as contrasted with the wealth of the patricians, remarks, "The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is an inventory to particularise their abundance; our suffering is a gain to them." For "object" we should, nowadays, say spectacle. But the corrector cannot have known that this was the meaning of the word, otherwise he surely never would have been so misguided as to propose the term abjectness in its place. "This substitution," says Mr Collier, "could hardly have proceeded from the mere taste or discretion of the old corrector." No, truly; but it proceeded from his want of taste, his want of discretion, and his want of knowledge.

The ink with which these MS. corrections were made, being, as Mr Collier tells us, of various shades, differing sometimes on the same page, he is of opinion that they "must have been introduced from time to time during, perhaps, the course of several years." We think this a highly probable supposition; only, instead of several years, we would suggest sixty or seventy years. So that, supposing the MS. corrector to have begun his work when he was about thirty, he may have completed it when he was about ninety or a hundred years of age. At any rate, he must have been in the last stage of second childhood when he jotted down the following new reading in the famous fable of the "belly and the members." The belly, speaking of the food it receives, says—

And so on; upon which one of the citizens asks Menenius, the relator of the fable, "How apply you this?"

Yet, with this line staring him in the face, the old corrector proposes to read,

The senate brain! when Shakespeare has distinctly told us that the senate is the belly. This indeed is the very point of the fable. Surely nothing except the most extreme degree of dotage can account for such a manifest perversion as that; yet Mr Collier says that "it much improves the sense.

The MS. corrector cannot have been nearly so old when he changed "almost" into all most in the line,

for this is decidedly an improvement, and ought, we think, to get admission into the text.

Scene 3.—Unless we can obtain a better substitute than contemning, we are not disposed to alter the received reading of these lines:

Scene 6.—In the following passage a small word occasions a great difficulty. Coriolanus, wishing to select a certain number out of a large body of soldiers who have offered him their services, says—

But why "four?" Surely four men would not be sufficient for the attack which he meditated. The MS. corrector gives us—

The second line is unintelligible, and not to be construed on any known principles of grammar. Mr Singer proposes—

We would suggest—

—that is: And my command shall quickly draw out, or select, those men which (men) are best inclined to be of service to me. The construction here is indeed awkward, but less awkward, we think, than that of the other emendations.