tter 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
author 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. Judgment, 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, shown 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; but 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 those
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 the violence of the contention between Pope and
Theobald, has been continued by the persecution, which, with a kind of
conspiracy, has been since raised against all the publishers of
Shakespeare.

That many passages have passed in a state of depravation through all the
editions, is indubitably certain; of these the restoration is only to be
attempted by collation of copies, or sagacity of conjecture. The
collator's province is safe and easy, the conjecturer's perilous and
difficult. Yet, as the greater part of the plays are extant only in one
copy, the peril must not be avoided, nor the difficulty refused.

Of the readings which this emulation of amendment has hitherto produced,
some from the labours of every publisher I have adv