uires
many words to prove it wrong; and the emendation wrong, that cannot
without so much labour appear to be right. The justness of a happy
restoration strikes at once, and the moral precept may be well applied
to criticism, "quod dubitas ne feceris."

To dread the shore which he sees spread with wrecks, is natural to the
sailor. I had before my eye so many critical adventures ended in
miscarriage, that caution was forced upon me. I encountered in every
page, wit struggling with its own sophistry, and learning confused by
the multiplicity of its views. I was forced to censure those whom I
admired, and could not but reflect, while I was dispossessing their
emendations, how soon the same fate might happen to my own, and how many
of the readings which I have corrected may be, by some other editor,
defended and established.

Critics I saw, that others' names efface,
And fix their own, with labour, in the place;
Their own, like others, soon their place resign'd,
Or disappear'd, and left the first behind.
POPE.

That a conjectural critick should often be mistaken, cannot be
wonderful, either to others or himself, if it be considered, that in his
art there is no system, no principal and axiomatical truth that
regulates subordinate positions. His chance of errour is renewed at
every attempt; an oblique view of the passage, a slight misapprehension
of a phrase, a casual inattention to the parts connected, is sufficient
to make him not only fail, but fail ridiculously; and when he succeeds
best, he produces, perhaps, but one reading of many probable, and he
that suggests another will always be able to dispute his claims.

It is an unhappy state, in which danger is hid under pleasure. The
allurements of emendation are scarcely resistible. Conjecture has all
the joy and all the pride of invention, and he that has once started a
happy change, is too much delighted to consider what objections may rise
against it.

Yet conjectural criticism has been of great use in the learned world;
nor is it my intention to depreciate a study, that has exercised so many
mighty minds, from the revival of learning to our own age, from the
bishop of Aleria[22] to English Bentley. The criticks on ancient authors
have, in the exercise of their sagacity, many assistances, which the
editor of Shakespeare is condemned to want. They are employed upon
grammatical and settled languages, whose construction con