Page:Shakespeare of Stratford (1926) Yale.djvu/106

90 ''tioner says. Then, how odd soever your brains be or your wisdoms, make your license the same, and spare not. Judge your six-penn’orth, your shilling’s worth, your five shillings’ worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the just rates, and welcome. But, whatever you do, buy! Censure will not drive a trade or make the jack go. And though you be a magistrate of wit, and sit on the stage at Blackfriars or the Cockpit to arraign plays daily, know, these plays have had their trial already and stood out all appeals, and do now come forth quitted rather by a decree of court than any purchased letters of commendation.''

''It had been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings; but since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you, do not envy his friends the office of their care and pain, to have collected and published them:—and so to have published them, as where before you were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them, even those are now offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest absolute in their numbers as he conceived them,—who, as he was a happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our province, who only gather his works and give them you, to praise him: it is yours’ that read him. And there, we hope, to your divers capacities, you will find enough both to draw and hold you; for his wit can no more lie hid than it''