Page:The Plays of William Shakspeare (1778).djvu/158

 that the whole amounted to about 25 words: and pretends to have annexed a complete list of the rest, which were not worth his embracing. Whoever has read my book will, at one glance, see how in both these points veracity is strained, so an injury might but be done. Malus, etsi obesse non potest, tamen cogitat.

Another expedient, to make my work appear of a trifling nature, has been an attempt to depreciate literal criticism. To this end, and to pay a servile compliment to Mr. Pope, an anonymous writer has, like a scotch pedlar in wit, unbraced his pack on the subject. But, that his virulence might not seem to be levelled singly at me, he has done me the honour to join Dr. Bentley in the libel. I was in hopes we should have been both abused with smartness of satire at least, though not with solidity of argument: that it might have been worth some reply in defence of the science attacked. But I may fairly say of this author, as Falstaff does of Poins;—''Hang him, baboon! his wit is as thick as Tewksbury mustard; there is no more conceit in him, than is in a''. If it be not prophanation to set the opinion of the divine Longinus against such a scribler, he tells us expressly, “That to make a judgment upon words (and writings) is the most consummate fruit of much experience. . Whenever words are depraved, the sense of course must be corrupted; and thence the reader is betrayed into a false meaning.

If the Latin and Greek languages have received the greatest advantages imaginable from the labours of the editors and criticks of the two last ages, by whose aid and assistance the grammarians have been enabled to write infinitely better in that art than even the preceding grammarians, who wrote when those tongues flourished as living languages; I should account it a peculiar happiness, that, by the faint essay I have made in this work, a path might be chalked out for abler hands, by which to derive the same advantages to our own tongue: a tongue, which, though it wants none of the fundamental qualities of an universal language, yet, as a noble writer says, lisps and stammers as in its cradle; and has produced little more towards its polishing than complaints of its barbarity.

Having now run through all those points, which I intended should make any part of this dissertation, and having in my former edition made publick acknowledgments of the