Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/295

JULIET'S RUNAWAY, ONCE MORE Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads and Dr. H. H. Furness's New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare; and Mr. Gosse—a fair and sound expositor—handsomely doffed his cap to the citation.

It happened that my first youthful notion of what Shakespearian criticism meant, in its subtile painstaking, was derived from an article in Putnam's Monthly by one who bravely started out as "Shakespeare's Scholar"—the early signature of R. G. White. His long paper was devoted to a consideration of its title: "Who was Juliet's Runaway?" That conundrum, I believe, has haunted every one to whom it has been put. Collier forty years ago declared that far more suggestions had been made in answer than there are letters in the disputed word. I remember the sense of awe with which I pondered on Mr. White's avowal: "He who discovers the needful word for the misprint  'runawayes eyes' . . . will secure the honorable mention of his name as long as the English language is read and spoken." What erudite humility, I thought, in his faith that "to correct a single passage in Shakespeare's text is glory enough for one man!" At that time he held a brief for the suggestion as to which he afterwards learned, when a riper "scholar," that Heath and Singer had anticipated him,—all three reading "That Rumoures eyes may wincke," instead of "That run-aways eyes," etc.:—in truth, a plausible conjecture. But in 1861 Mr. White had gone back to the belief of Warburton that the word as it stands is correct, and not a misprint; that it relates to Phœbus, the Sun, the god of day. [281]