248 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



He is at times positively incredible, worse even than Mr. 

 Halliwell, and that is saying a good deal. Worthless as Love 

 lace s poems were, they should have been edited correctly, if 

 edited at all. Even dulness and dirtiness have a right to fair 

 play, and to be dull and dirty in their own way. Mr. Hazlitt 

 has allowed all the misprints of the original (or by far the 

 greater part of them) to stand, but he has ventured on many 

 emendations of the text, and in every important instance has 

 blundered, and that, too, even where the habitual practice of his 

 author in the use of words might have led him right. The mis 

 apprehension shown in some of his notes is beyond the belief of 

 any not familiar with the way in which old books are edited in 

 England by the job. We have brought a heavy indictment, and 

 we proceed to our proof, choosing only cases where there can 

 be no dispute. We should premise that Mr. Hazlitt professes 

 to have corrected the punctuation. 



And though he sees it full of wounds, 

 Cruel one, still he wounds it. (p. 34.) 



Here the original reads, ( Cruel still on/ and the only correction 

 needed was a comma after cruel. 



And by the glorious light 



Of both those stars, which oi their spheres bereft, 

 Only the jelly s left. (p. 41.) 



The original has of which, and rightly, for their spheres 

 bereft is parenthetic, and the sense is * of which only the jelly s 

 left. Lovelace is speaking of the eyes of a mistress who has 

 grown old, and his image, confused as it is, is based on the 

 belief that stars shooting from their spheres fell to the earth as 

 jellies a belief, by the way, still to be met with in New England. 

 Lovelace, describing a cow (and it is one of the few pretty 

 passages in the volume), says, 



She was the largest, goodliest beast 

 That ever mead or altar blest, 

 Round as her udder, and more white 

 Than is the Milky- Way in night, (p. 64.) 



Mr. Hazlitt changes to Round was her udder, thus making that 

 white instead of the cow, as Lovelace intended. On the next 

 page we read, 



She takes her leave o th mournful neat, 

 Who, by her toucht, now prizeth her life, 

 Worthy alone the hollowed knife. 



Compare Chapman (II., xviii. 480): 



Slew all their white fleec d sheep and neat. 



The original was prize their life, and the use of neat as a 



