suppressed, and his contemptible ostentation 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 some notes may justify or excuse the contraction of the rest.

Theobald, thus weak and ignorant, thus mean and faithless, thus petulant
and ostentatious, 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 solicit favour, against those
who command reverence; and so easily is he praised, whom no man can envy.

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 discovered, and
that dexterity of intellect which dispatches its work by the easiest
means. He 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 sometimes hastily
makes what a little more attention would have found. He is solicitous to
reduce to grammar what he could not be sure that his author intended to be
grammatical. Shakespeare regarded more the series of ideas, than of words;
and his language, not being designed for the reader's desk, was all that
he desired it to be, if it conveyed his meaning to the audience.

Hanmer's care of the metre has been too violently censured. He found the
measure reformed in so many passages, by the silent labours of some
editors, with the silent acquiescence of the rest, that he thought himself
allowed to extend a little further the licence which had already been
carried so far without reprehension; and of his corrections in general, it
must be confessed 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 predecessors, and made his own edition of little authority. His
confidence indeed, both in himself and others, was too great; he supposes
all to be right that was done by Pope and Theobald; he seems not to
suspect a cri