Such another laborious scoundrel, who labored for
the labor's sake, the world surely never saw!
[Footnote jj: Dr. Ingleby says,--"The collations of that single play are
a perfect picture of the contents of the original, and a just sample of
the other plays in that volume."--_Complete View_, p. 131.]
But among these marginal changes in "Hamlet," a large number present
a very striking and significant peculiarity,--a peculiarity which was
noticed in our previous article as characterizing other marginal changes
in the same volume, and which it is impossible to reconcile with the
purpose of a forger who knew enough to make the body of the corrections
on these margins, and who meant to obtain authority for them as being,
in the words of Mr. Collier, "Early Manuscript Corrections in the Folio
of 1632." That peculiarity is a _modernization of the text absolutely
fatal to the "early" pretensions of the readings;_ and it appears in the
regulation of the loose spelling prevalent at the publication of this
folio, and for many years after, by the standard of the more regular
and approximately analogous fashion of a later period, and also in the
establishment of grammatical concords, which, entirely disregarded in
the former period, were observed by well-educated people in the latter.
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