But since it hath bin ordain'd otherwise, and he by death departed from
that right, we pray you do not envie his Friends, the office of their
care, and paine, to haue collected & publish'd them, as where (before)
you were abus'd with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed,
and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious impostors, that
expos'd them: euen those, are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and
perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as
he conceiued th[=e]. Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a
most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: And what
he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse
receiued from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our prouince, who
onely gather his works, and giue them you, to praise him. It is yours
that reade him.'

These are hardly the words of men who would take liberties, and
liberties enormous, after ideas of their own, with the text of a friend
thus honoured. But although they printed with intent altogether
faithful, they did so certainly without any adequate jealousy of the
printers--apparently without a suspicion of how they could blunder. Of
blunders therefore in the Folio also there are many, some through mere
following of blundered print, some in fresh corruption of the same, some
through mistaking of the manuscript corrections, and some probably from
the misprinting of mistakes, so that the corrections themselves are at
times anything but correctly recorded. I assume also that the printers
were not altogether above the mean passion, common to the day-labourers
of Art, from Chaucer's Adam Scrivener down to the present carvers of
marble, for modifying and improving the work of the master. The vain
incapacity of a self-constituted critic will make him regard his poorest
fancy as an emendation; seldom has he the insight of Touchstone to
recognize, or his modesty to acknowledge, that although his own, it is