; he solicited no
addition of honour from the reader. He, therefore, made no scruple to
repeat the same jests in many dialogues, or to entangle different plots
by the same knot of perplexity; which may be at least forgiven him, by
those who recollect that of Congreve's four comedies, two are concluded
by a marriage in a mask, by a deception, which, perhaps, never happened,
and which, whether likely or not, he did not invent.

So careless was this great poet of future fame, that, though he retired
to ease and plenty, while he was yet little _declined into the vale of
years_, before he could be disgusted with fatigue, or disabled by
infirmity, he made no collection of his works, nor desired to rescue
those that had been already published from the depravations that
obscured them, or secure to the rest a better destiny, by giving them to
the world in their genuine state.

Of the plays which bear the name of Shakespeare in the late editions,
the greater part were not published till about seven years after his
death; and the few which appeared in his life are apparently thrust into
the world without the care of the author, and, therefore, probably
without his knowledge.

Of all the publishers, clandestine or professed, the negligence and
unskilfulness has, by the late revisers, been sufficiently shown. The
faults of all are, indeed, numerous and gross, and have not only
corrupted many passages, perhaps, beyond recovery, but have brought
others into suspicion, which are only obscured by obsolete phraseology,
or by the writer's unskilfulness and affectation. To alter is more easy
than to explain, and temerity is a more common quality than diligence.
Those who saw that they must employ conjecture to a certain degree, were
willing to indulge it a little further. Had the author published his own
works, we should have sat quietly down to disentangle his intricacies,
and clear his obscurities; but now we tear what we cannot loose, and
eject what we happen not to understand.

The faults are more than could have happened without the concurrence of
many causes. The style of Shakespeare was in itself ungrammatical,
perplexed, and obscure; his works were transcribed for the players by
those who may be supposed to have seldom understood them; they were
transmitted by copiers equally unskilful, who still multiplied errours;
they were, perhaps, sometimes mutilated by the actors, for the sake of
shortening the speeches; and were at last