mination. He speaks sometimes indefinitely of copies, when he has
only one. In his enumeration of editions, he mentions the two first
folios as of high, and the third folio as of middle authority; but the
truth is, that the first is equivalent to all others, and that the rest
only deviate from it by the printer's negligence. Whoever has any of the
folios has all, excepting those diversities which mere reiteration of
editions will produce[19]. I collated them all, at the beginning, but
afterwards used only the first.

Of his notes I have generally retained those which he retained himself
in his second edition, except when they were confuted by subsequent
annotators, or were too minute to merit preservation. I have sometimes
adopted his restoration of a comma, without inserting the panegyrick in
which he celebrated himself for his achievement. The exuberant
excrescence of his diction I have often lopped, his triumphant
exultations over Pope and Howe I have sometimes suppressed, and his
contemptible ostentation I have frequently concealed; but I have in some
places shown him, as he would have shown himself, for the reader's
diversion, that the inflated emptiness of some notes may justify or
excuse the contraction of the rest.

Theobald, thus weak and ignorant, thus mean and faithless, thus petulant
and ostentatious, by the good luck of having Pope for his enemy, has
escaped, and escaped alone, with reputation, from this undertaking. So
willingly does the world support those who solicit favour against those
who command reverence; and so easily is he praised 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 such
studies. He had, what is the first requisite to emendatory criticism,
that intuition by which the poet's intention is immediately discovered,
and that dexterity of intellect which despatches its work by the easiest
means. He had undoubtedly read much; his acquaintance with customs,
opinions, and traditions, seems to have been large; and he is often
learned without show. He seldom passes what he does not understand,
without an attempt to find or to make a meaning, and sometimes hastily
makes what a little more attention would have found. He is solicitous to
reduce to grammar what he could not be sure that his author intended to
be grammatical. Shakespeare regarded more the series of ideas, than of
words; and his