emender

Here, Fallows suggests that the emender was also a professional musician, and because this was one of the last pieces copied into the manuscript, the emendations could have been done at any time, even after the manuscript ceased to be used.

The most recent edition to have included the version Hopkins favored was Hawkins' Oxford edition of 1770-71, in a move which Warburton had rejected because the alteration to "I know a hawk from a hernshaw" was "a corruption of the players" in the quarto; "whereas the poet found the proverb thus corrupted in the mouths of the people." Whether or not Hopkins had taken the trouble to consult this Oxford edition, or whether he had looked at Johnson and Steevens' edition of 1772, which reprints Warburton's caveat, he was still committing what Warburton, a notoriou s emender, had regarded as the purist's error of restoring what had never been there.