etween, of natural painting,
and of apt unsought pathos--these numerous and excellent qualifications
met upon the subject of all subjects nearest to all--MAN--speedily made
the first great, original, serious writing of Pope a textbook and a manual
for its branch of ethico-theosophy, in every house where there were books
in England. These powerful excellences of this great poem did more. They
inwove its terse, vigorous, clear, significant, wise, loving, noble,
beautiful, and musical sentences--east, west, north, south--with all
memories, the mature and the immature--even as in that old, brave day of
the world or ever books were.

Pause, gentle reader, for a while, and reflect kindly on these paragraphs
for the sake of Alexander Pope and Christopher North. And now accompany us
while we select our specimens of the British critics, from the
"Nightingale of Twickenham's" preface to the works of Shakspeare. What he
proposed to accomplish in this undertaking was, "to give a more correct
text from the collated copies of the old editions, without any innovation
or indulgence to his own private sense, or conjecture; to insert the
various readings in the margin, and to place the suspected passages or
interpolations at the bottom of the page; to this was added an explanation
of some of the more obsolete or unusual words; and such as appeared to him
the most striking passages were marked by a star, or by inverted commas."
Warton laments that Pope ever undertook this edition; "a task which the
course of his reading and studies did not qualify him to execute with the
ability and skill which it deserved, and with which it has since been
executed;" but though it was a failure, there was no occasion for
lamentation. Johnson says more wisely, "that Pope did many things wrong,
and left many things undone, but let him not be defrauded of his due
praise. He was the first that knew, or at least, the first that told by
what helps the text might be improved. If he inspected the early editions
negligently, he taught others to be more accurate. In his preface he
expanded with great skill and eloquence the character which had been given
of Shakspeare by Dryden; and he drew the public attention upon his works,
which, though often mentioned, had been little read."

Warton, too, admits that the "preface is written with taste, judgment,
purity, and elegance." Pope speaks modestly of the design of his preface,
which is not, he says, to enter into a cri