new system, is to
demolish the fabricks which are standing. The chief desire of him that
comments an author, is to shew how much other commentators have corrupted
and obscured 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 sudden meteors of intelligence,
which for a while appear to shoot their beams into the regions of
obscurity, on a sudden withdraw their lustre, 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 escaped by the highest and brightest of mankind, may surely be endured
with patience by criticks and annotators, who can rank themselves but as
the satellites of their authors. How canst thou beg for life, says Homer's
hero to his captive, when thou knowest that thou art now to suffer only
what must another day be suffered by Achilles?

Dr. Warburton had a name sufficient 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 assailants are the authors of _The canons
of criticism_, and of _The revisal of Shakespeare's text_; of whom one
ridicules his errors with airy petulance, suitable enough to the levity of
the controversy; the other attacks them with gloomy malignity, as if he
were dragging to justice an assassin or incendiary. The one stings like a
fly, sucks 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
crosses 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 acuteness sufficient in the discove