Page:The Plays of William Shakspeare (1778).djvu/58

46 the panegyrick in which he celebrated himelf for his atchievement. The exuberant excrecence of his diction I have often lopped, his triumphant exultations over Pope and Rowe I have ometimes uppreed, and his contemptible otentation I have frequently concealed; but I have in ome places hewn him, as he would have hewn himelf, for the reader’s diverion, that the inflated emptines of ome notes may jutify or excue the contraction of the ret.

Theobald, thus weak and ignorant, thus mean and aithles, thus petulant and otentatious, by the good luck of having Pope for his enemy, has ecaped, and ecaped alone, with reputation, from this undertaking. So willingly does the world upport thoe who olicit favour, againt thoe who command reverence; and o eaily is he praied, 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 uch tudies. He had, what is the firt requiite to emendatory criticim, that intuition by which the poet’s intention is immediately dicovered, and that dexterity of intellect which dipatches its work by the eaiet means. He had undoubtedly read much; his acquaintance with cutoms, opinions, and traditions, eems to have been large; and he is often learned without hew. He eldom paes what he does not undertand, without an attempt to find or to make a meaning, and ometimes hatily makes what a little more attention would have found. He is olicitous to reduce to grammar, what he could not be ure that his author intended to