diction I have often lopped, his triumphant exulta tations over Pope and Rowe I have fometimes fuppressed, and his contemptible oftentation I have frequently concealed, but I have in some places shewn him, as he would have shewn himself, for the reader's diversion, that the inflated emptiness of fome notes may justify or excuse the contraction of the rest.

Theobald, thus weak and ignorant, thus mean and faithless, thus petulant and oftentatious, by the good luck of having Pope for his enemy, has escaped, and escaped alone, with reputation, from this undertaking. So willingly does the world support those who folicit favour, against those who command reverence; and fo eafily is he praised, whom no man can envy.

He

Our author fell then into the hands of Sir Thomas Hanmer, the Oxford editor, a man, in my opinion, eminently qualified by nature for such studies. He had, what is the first requisite to emendatory criticism, that intuition by which the poet's intention is immediately difcovered, and that dexterity of intellect which dispatches its work by the easiest means. had undoubtedly read much; his acquaintance with customs, opinions, and traditions, seems to have been large; and he is often learned without shew. He seldom passes what he does not understand, without an attempt to find or to make a meaning, and fometimes hastily makes what a little more attention would have found. He is folicitous to reduce to grammar, what he could not be fure that his author intended to be grammatical. Shakespeare regarded more the feries of ideas, than of words; and his language,

not

not being designed for the reader's desk, was all that he defired it to be, if it conveyed his meaning to the audience.

Hanmer's care of the inetre has been too violently cenfured. He found the measure reformed in fo many passages, by the filent labours of fome editors, with the filent acquiefcence of the reft, that he thought himself allowed to extend a little further the licence, which had already been carried fo far without reprehenfion; and of his corrections in general, it must be confefsed, that they are often just, and made commonly with the least possible violation of the

text.

But, by inserting his emendations, whether invented or borrowed, into the page, without any notice of varying copies, he has appropriated the labour of his predeceffors, and made his own edition of little authority. His confidence indeed, both in himfelf and others, was too great; he supposes all to be right that was done by Pope and Theobald; he seems not to suspect a critick of fallibility, and it was but reasonable that he should claim what he so liberally granted.

As he never writes without careful enquiry and diligent confideration, I have received all his notes, and believe that every reader will wish for more.

Of the last editor it is more difficult to speak. Respect is due to high place, tenderness to living reputation, and veneration to genius and learning;

but

but he cannot be justly offended at that liberty of which he has himself so frequently given an example, nor very folicitous what is thought of notes, which he ought never to have confidered as part of his serious employments, and which, I suppose, since the ardor of composition is remitted, he no longer numbers among his happy effusions.

The original and predominant error of his commentary, is acquiefcence in his first thoughts; that precipitation which is produced by confciousness of quick difcernment, and that confidence which prefumes to do, by furveying the furface, what labour only can perform, by penetrating the bottom. His notes exhibit fometimes perverse interpretations, and fometimes improbable conjectures; he at one time gives the author more profundity of meaning than the fentence admits, and at another discovers abfurdities, where the sense is plain to every other reader. But his emendations are likewife often happy and just; and his interpretation of obfcure passages learned and sagacious.

Of his notes, I have commonly rejected those, against which the general voice of the publick has exclaimed, or which their own incongruity immediately condemns, and which, I suppose, the author himself would defire to be forgotten. Of the reft, to part I have given the highest approbation, by inserting the offered reading in the text; part I have left to the judgment of the reader, as doubtful, though specious; and part I have cenfured without referve,

referve, but I am sure without bitterness of malice, and, I hope, without wantonness of infult.

It is no pleasure to me, in revising my volumes, to observe how much paper is wasted in confutation. Whoever confiders the revolutions of learning, and the various questions of greater or less importance, upon which wit and reason have exercised their powers, must lament the unfuccessfulness of enquiry, and the flow advances of truth, when he reflects, that great part of the labour of every writer is only the deftruction of those that went before him. The first care of the builder of a new system, is to demolish the fabricks which are standing. The chief defire of him that comments an author, is to shew how much other commentators have corrupted and obfcured him. The opinions prevalent in one age, as truths above the reach of controversy, are confuted and rejected in another, and rise again to reception in remoter times. Thus the human mind is kept in motion without progress. Thus sometimes truth and error, and sometimes contrarieties of error, take each other's place by reciprocal invasion. The tide of seeming knowledge which is poured over one generation, retires and leaves another naked and barren; the fudden meteors of intelligence, which for a while appear to shoot their beams into the regions of obscurity, on a sudden withdraw their luftre, and leave mortals again to grope their way.

These elevations and depressions of renown, and the contradictions to which all improvers of knowledge must for ever be exposed, since they are not VOL. I.

[D]

escaped

:

:

escaped by the highest and brightest of mankind, may furely be endured with patience by criticks and annotators, who can rank themselves but as the fatellites of their authors. How canft thou beg for life, says Homer's hero to his captive, when thou knowest that thou art now to fuffer only what must another day be fuffered by Achilles ?

Dr. Warburton had a name fufficient to confer celebrity on those who could exalt themselves into antagonists, and his notes have raised a clamour too loud to be distinct. His chief afsailants are the authors of The canons of criticism, and of The review of Shakespeare's text; of whom one ridicules his errors with airy petulance, fuitable enough to the levity of the controverfy; the other attacks them with gloomy malignity, as if he were dragging to justice an affaffin or incendiary. The one stings like a fly, fucks a little blood, takes a gay flutter, and returns for more; the other bites like a viper, and would be glad to leave inflammations and gangrene behind him. When I think on one, with his confederates, I remember the danger of Coriolanus, who was afraid that girls with spits, and boys with stones, should slay him in puny battle; when the other croffes my imagination, I remember the prodigy in Macbeth :

A falcon tow'ring in his pride of place,

Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and kill'd.

Let me however do them justice. One is a wit, and one a scholar *. They have both shewn acute

* It is extraordinary that this gentleman should attempt fo voluminous a work, as the Revisal of Shakespeare's text, when he tells us in his preface," he was not fo fortunate as to be " furnished