In those lines, the corrector, beside supplying the stage direction _Lay it downe_, has added a comma after "hand," substituted a period for the colon after "Art," and a capital for a small _w_ in "wipe." Would a forger do such minute and needless work as this, and do it so carelessly, too, as this one did? for, to make the colon a period, he merely strikes his pen lightly through the upper point; and, to make the small _w_ a capital, he merely lengthens its lines upward.
In the passage from "The Taming of the Shrew," we see, what Mr. Collier himself notices in his "Notes and Emendations," that the prefix to the tinker's speeches, which in the folios is invariably _Beg._ [Beggar], is changed to _Sly;_ and this is done in every instance. We have not counted _Sly's_ speeches; but they are numerous enough to force the unanswerable question, With what possible purpose could this task have been undertaken by a forger? for the change adds nothing to our knowledge of the interlocutors, and produces no variation in the reading.
In a passage given from "The Winter's Tale," Act IV. Sc. 3, we find these lines:--
"_Pol._ This is the pettiest Low-borne Lasse, that ever, Ran on the greene-sord: Nothing she do's _or seemes,_"--
where "seems" is changed to "says," by striking out all but the first and last letters, and writing _ay_ in the margin. In a passage given from "Troilus and Cressida," Act V. Sc. 2, we have this line:--
"Good traders in the flesh, set this in your painted cloathes,"--
where the _a_ in the last word is struck out. In a speech of the Moor's, given from "Othello," Act IV. Sc. 1, we notice this sentence:--
"It is not words that shakes me thus, (pish)."
where the final _s_ is struck from "shakes." This is strange work for a forger of antique readings, a man who is supposed to be detected at his work by writing "bodie" in ink, when his pencil memorandum was "body." For, in these instances, he has _modernized the text_, and, except in the first, that is _all_ that he has done. If he had wished his text to look old, he would have left the last _e_ in "seemes," and read "sayes"; he would not have been at the trouble of striking out the _a_ in "painted cloathes;" [Footnote: See As You Like It, in the folio of 1623, p. 196, col. 2, "I answer you right painted _cloath_," and Henry VIII., _Idem_, p. 224, col. 2, "They that beare the _Cloath_ of Honour ouer her."] and he would have left the _s_ in "shakes," which superfluity is one of the most marked and best-known characteristics of English books published before the middle of the seventeenth century. Instances of this kind, in which a forger would have defeated his own purpose to gain nothing, must be countless upon the nine hundred and odd pages of the Collier folio, of which the eighteen fac-similes, from which we have quoted, do not give us as much as would fill a single page of the original.