excited his wrath and "tears" by venturing upon such an act
of sacrilege as putting his hand into an old glove, which Fur-
ness had deluded himself into believing once belonged to the
subject of his lifelong idolatry. At the present time seventeen
volumes of his work have been printed comprising over eight
thousand pages, a large part of which is of the precise char-
acter of what we have here quoted; and though Furness has
ended his labors, his work is being carried on in the same
manner by his worthy son, who has admirably learned his
trade, and can dovetail with the same nicety as his honored
forbear. The world, therefore, is to be endowed with many
more volumes, probably no more flawed with erroneous opin-
ions and positive errors than those already published, a trifling
matter, as a volume of corrigenda would take care of these
if not annotated; if they were, it would, of course, require several
more volumes, and this might be thought desirable in order to
maintain the "monumental" feature of the work.

It was estimated many years ago that ten thousand vol-
umes, large and small, had been written on the "Shakespeare"
Works. This number should have about doubled by this time,
and it is but true to say that they constitute such a confusing
mass of irreconcilable opinions as to be useless to students,
except as a warning against juggling with glittering theories
in literary criticism. This, however, can hardly compensate
for the dissemination of so much fiction, and the imposition
of useless toil to overworked librarians and callow students.

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