no dullness could ignore and no malignity deny the value of the service done, the greatness of the benefits conferred. On the other hand, I am impelled, however unwillingly, to enter my protest against the general principle on which the text has been recast and rearranged. The very slightest change of reading, though it should be but a change in punctuation, ought never to be offered without necessity, as it can never be received without reluctance. To throw over for some new version, though never so rational or plausible, the text we have by heart, the words which line by line and letter by letter have grown as it were a part of ourselves, have worked their way (so to speak) into the very lifeblood of our thought, the very core and conscience of our memory, cannot but be pain and grief to any faithful and loving student. But in this revision, so far from showing any tenderness or respect for such feelings as he might have been supposed to share, Mr. Rossetti has too often handled Shelley, I will not say as Milton was handled by Bentley, but I must say as Shakespeare was handled by Steevens. The punctilious if not pedantic precision which has reformed the whole scheme of punctuation, doubtless often loose enough in the original editions, compels us to remark that the last state of this text is worse than the first. This edition is beyond praise and beyond price as a book of reference; but no one, I should imagine, will ever read in it for pleasure, while he can procure instead the loosest and most incorrect of those previously printed. Throughout the whole five acts of the "Cenci" the reader is incessantly irritated by such small but significant vexations as the substitution of "you" for "thou" or