d or
recovered. What can be known, will be collected by chance, from the
recesses of obscure and obsolete papers, perused commonly with some
other view. Of this knowledge every man has some, and none has much;
but when an authour has engaged the publick attention, those who can
add any thing to his illustration, communicate their discoveries, and
time produces what had eluded diligence.

To time I have been obliged to resign many passages, which, though I
did not understand them, will perhaps hereafter be explained, having,
I hope, illustrated some, which others have neglected or mistaken,
sometimes by short remarks, or marginal directions, such as every
editor has added at his will, and often by comments more laborious
than the matter will seem to deserve; but that which is most difficult
is not always most important, and to an editor nothing is a trifle by
which his authour is obscured.

The poetical beauties or defects I have not been very diligent to
observe. Some plays have more, and some fewer judicial observations,
not in proportion to their difference of merit, but because I gave
this part of my design to chance and to caprice. The reader, I
believe, is seldom pleased to find his opinion anticipated; it is
natural to delight more in what we find or make, than in what we
receive. Judgement, like other faculties, is improved by practice, and
its advancement is hindered by submission to dictatorial decisions, as
the memory grows torpid by the use of a table book. Some initiation is
however necessary; of all skill, part is infused by precept, and part
is obtained by habit; I have therefore shewn so much as may enable the
candidate of criticism to discover the rest.

To the end of most plays, I have added short strictures, containing
a general censure of faults, or praise of excellence; in which I know
not how much I have concurred with the current opinion; tut I have
not, by any affectation of singularity, deviated from it. Nothing
is minutely and particularly examined, and therefore it is to be
supposed, that in the plays which are condemned there is much to be
praised, and in these which are praised much to be condemned.

The part of criticism in which the whole succession of editors has
laboured with the greatest diligence, which has occasioned the
most arrogant ostentation, and excited the keenest acrimony, is the
emendation of corrupted passages, to which the publick attention
having been first drawn by th