Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/352

 348 Mason 1599 to 1601, and, therefore, accept that period as its time of composition" where the early parenthetical "I" is suddenly called upon to do duty as subject of the last clause. On the next page, various sins against the principles of punctuation, symme- try, and mere intelligibility are committed in this fragment of a sentence: "this for two reasons, first, Skeat's text is that of the edition of 1603, and it is at times interesting to note the slight verbal changes between the two editions; secondly, for conven- ience of reference; the chapter divisions as in Skeat's work are entirely absent in the earlier edition. " On page x this crudity occurs: "Shakespeare's tragedy was the first of all his works to be translated into German, and through which he became first known in Germany" (read: "and was the one through which he first became"). Faulty sentences also disfigure the rest of the volume such as the 'comma-sentence': "Capell's objec- tion is, I think, apposite, he says: 'This refinement upon a thought,' etc." (205); clause punctuated as sentence (225); 'comma-sentence' (242); clumsily ambiguous phrasing (281, line 17); general amorphousness and incoherence, third sen- tence in second paragraph, and third in third paragraph (463). Violations of idiom in the use of prepositions are common; while at times Mr. Furness apparently even misquotes his authorities in order to be ungrammatical as on page 253, "The abandonment of his principles form part of his tragic failure"; and page 297, "That of 1603 is the worse printed of the three early editions." Similarly, on page 25, Grant White's statement that "the poet was led" into a mistake is transmuted by Mr. Furness into "lead." In view of these deplorable lapses in mere elementary literacy, one feels more than the usual distaste for the affectation and would-be elegance of "Be it understood," "Whether it were that in Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar who shall say?," "Within the last twenty-five years the text of Shakespeare is become so settled," etc., etc. One closing illustration of the peril involved in too complacently assuming a virtue when one has it not may be instructive: on pages 276, 277, in the footnotes on V, v, 85, 86, 87, Mr. Furness prints The Baron's Wars, five times over, thus mis- representing three different authorities (Steevens, Malone, and White: who all, of course, modernize the title correctly as The Barons' Wars} and contributing one original misuse (in his