oth even to do _him_ Justice at
the Expence of _that other_ Gentleman's Character."

Whether or not these declarations were sincere, they would hardly have
stayed the resentment of a less sensitive man than Pope when passage after
passage was pointed out where errors were "as well committed as
unamended." Theobald even hazarded the roguish suggestion that the
bookseller had played his editor false by not sending him all the sheets
to revise; and he certainly showed that the readings of Rowe's edition had
occasionally been adopted without the professed collation of the older
copies. The volume could raise no doubt of Theobald's own diligence. The
chief part of it is devoted to an examination of the text of _Hamlet_, but
there is a long appendix dealing with readings in other plays, and in it
occurs the famous emendation of the line in _Henry V._ describing
Falstaff's death,--"for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and _a' babled of
green fields_." It should be noted that the credit of this reading is not
entirely Theobald's. He admits that in an edition "with some marginal
conjectures of a Gentleman sometime deceased" he found the emendation "and
_a' talked_ of green fields." Theobald's share thus amounts to the
doubtful improvement of substituting _babbled_ for _talked_.

Though this volume has undoubted merits, it is not difficult to understand
why the name of Theobald came to convey to the eighteenth century the idea
of painful pedantry, and why one so eminently just as Johnson should have
dubbed him "a man of heavy diligence, with very slender powers." While his
knowledge is indisputable, he has little or no delicacy of taste; his
style is dull and lumbering; and the mere fact that he dedicated his
_Shakespeare Restored_ to John Rich, the Covent Garden manager who
specialised in pantomime and played the part of harlequin, may at least
cast some doubt on his discretion. But he successfully attacked Pope where
he was weakest and where as an editor he should have been strongest. "From
this time," in the words of Johnson, "Pope became an enemy to editors,
collators, commentators, and verbal critics; and hoped to persuade the
world that he had miscarried in this undertaking only by having a mind too
great for such minute employment."

Not content with the errors pointed out in _Shakespeare Restored_--a quarto
volume of two hundred pages--Theobald continued his criticisms of Pope's
edition in _Mist's Journal_ and the _