300 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



Shakespeare and the contemporary dramatists of his 

 age sometimes attuned their well-strung harps to the 

 songs of Zion." Comment on statements like these 

 would be as useless as the assertions themselves are 

 absurd. 



We have quoted these examples only to justify us in 

 saying that Mr. Smith must select his editors w'ith 

 more care if he wishes that his " Library of Old 

 Authors " should deserve the confidence and thereby gain 

 the good word of intelligent readers, — without which 

 such a series can neither win nor keep the patronage of 

 the public. It is impossible that men who cannot con- 

 struct an English sentence correctly, and who do not 

 know the value of clearness in writing, should be able 

 to disentangle the knots which slovenly printers have 

 tied in the thread of an old author's meaning ; and it is 

 more than doubtful whether they who assert carelessly, 

 cite inaccurately, and write loosely are not by nature 

 disqualified for doing thoroughly what they undertake 

 to do. If it were unreasonable to demand of every one 

 who assumes to edit one of our early poets the critical 

 acumen, the genial sense, the illimitable reading, the 

 philological scholarship, which in combination would 

 alone make the ideal editor, it is not presumptuous to 

 expect some one of these qualifications singly, and we 

 have the right to insist upon patience and accuracy, 

 which are within the reach of every one, and without 

 which all the others are wellnigh vain. Now to this 

 virtue of accuracy Mr. Offor specifically lays claim in 

 one of his remarkable sentences : " We are bound to ad- 

 mire," he says, " the accuracy and beauty of this speci- 

 men of typography. Following in the path of my late 

 friend William Pickering, our publisher rivals the 

 Aldine and Elzevir presses, which have been so univer- 

 sally admired." We should think that it was the pn> 



