"I do profess
That for your highness' good I ever labour'd
More than mine own: that _I'm true_, and will be,
Though all the world should lack their duty to you,
And throw it from their soul: though perils did
Abound, as thick as thought could make them, and
Appear in forms more horrid; yet my duty
(As doth a rock against the chiding flood)
Should the approach of this wild river break,
And stand unshaken yours."
Your Leeds correspondent would read:
"I do profess
That for your highness' good I ever labour'd
More than mine own.--_That_, am _I_, have, and will be,
Though all the world should crack their duty to you
And throw it from their soul," &c.
For his arguments I must refer to his note (p. 111. _antè_), merely
observing that I cannot conceive how any alteration in the punctuation of
the King's speech could connect it with this! Making _That_ emphatic helps
nothing, as there is no antecedent to which it can refer; and if "we can by
no means part with _have_," we must interpolate _been_ after it to make it
any way intelligible, to the marring of the verse.
With regard to the substitution of _lack_ for _crack_ in my former note, it
should be recollected that I then said "I do not insist upon this." We
might, however, substitute _slack_, if change should be deemed necessary,
and it would be still nearer in form to the suspected word.
I may safely leave the _palpable_ error in _As You Like It_ to the decision
of common sense.
As I am dealing with corrections in the play of _King Henry VIII._, I may
take occasion to observe that MR. COLLIER, in his recent supplemental
volume of _Notes and Emendations_, has, I have no doubt unwittingly, stated
that a passage, Act IV. Sc. 2., has been absurdly pointed, "over and over
again, from the year 1623 to our own day." Whereas it will be found
corrected, exactly as it stands in his second folio, in the edition I gave
of Shakspeare in 1826, with a note adverting to the absurdity of the old
pointing. I may further add, that the first instance MR. COLLIER gives in
his preface of the corrections in his folio, is in the same predicament. He
has stated that the reading of "Aristotle's _cheeks_" for "Aristotle's
_ethics_," in the first scene of the _Taming of the Shrew_, "has been the
invariable text from the first publication in 1623 until our own day;" when
the fact is, that it stands properly corrected in my edition in 1826, with
the following note:
"Blackstone suggests that we should read _ethics_, and the sense seems
to require it; I have therefore admitted it into the text."
It is possible that MR. COLLIER may have never looked into my edition of
the poet, and I may honestly say that I regret it, not on my own account
but on his, for I think, had he consulted it, his own would not have been
the worse for it.