with the following note--

"The meaning of this passage seems to have been misunderstood by
all the commentators. Ferdinand says that the thoughts of
Miranda so refresh his labours, that when he is most busy he
seems to feel his toil _least_. It is printed in the folio
1623,--

'Most busy _lest_ when I do it,'

--a trifling error of the press corrected in the folio 1632,
although Theobald tells us that both the oldest editions read
_lest_. Not catching the poet's meaning, he printed,--

'Most busy-_less_ when I do it,'

and his supposed emendation has ever since been taken as the
text; even Capell adopted it. I am happy in having Mr. Amyot's
concurrence in this restoration."

Mr. Knight adopts Theobald's reading, and Mr. Dyce approves it in the
following words:--

"When Theobald made the emendation, 'Most busy-_less_,' he
observed that 'the corruption was so very little removed from
the truth of the text, that he could not afford to think well of
his own sagacity for having discovered it.' The correction is,
indeed, so obvious that we may well wonder that it had escaped
his predecessors; but we must wonder ten times more that one of
his successors, in a blind reverence for the old copy, should