s Magazine_, and the _Annual Register_. The _Monthly Review_
devotes its two articles (October and November, 1765) chiefly to the
Preface. It examines at considerable length Johnson's arguments against
the "unities," and concludes that "there is hardly one of them which does
not seem false or foreign to the subject." The _Critical Review_, on the
other hand, pronounces them "worthy of Mr. Johnson's pen"; and the _London
Magazine_ admits their force, though it wishes that Johnson had "rather
retained the character of a reasoner than assumed that of a pleader."

Richard Farmer.

Farmer's _Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare_ was published at Cambridge
early in January, 1767. In the Preface to the second and enlarged edition,
which appeared in the same year, Farmer says that "the few who have been
pleased to controvert any part of his doctrine have favoured him with
better manners than arguments." This remark, like most of the Preface,
appears to be directed chiefly at the prejudiced notice which appeared in
the _Critical Review_ for January, 1767. The writer of it was well versed
in the controversy, for he had expressed his opinion unhesitatingly in an
earlier number, and he lost no time in advancing new evidence in
opposition to Farmer's doctrine; but he only provided Farmer with new
proofs, which were at once incorporated in the text of the Essay. The
third edition, which was called for in 1789, differs from the second only
by the inclusion of a short "advertisement" and a final note explaining
that Farmer had abandoned his intention of publishing the _Antiquities of
Leicester_. In the "Advertisement" he admits that "a few corrections might
probably be made, and many additional proofs of the argument have
necessarily occurred in more than twenty years"; but he did not think it
necessary to make any changes. He was content to leave the book in the
hands of the printers, and accordingly he is still described on the
title-page as "Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge," though he had
succeeded to the mastership of his college in 1775.

Farmer had, however, already supplemented his Essay by a letter to
Steevens, who printed it as an appendix to his edition of Johnson's
Shakespeare in 1773. "The track of reading," says Farmer, "which I
sometime ago endeavoured to prove more immediately necessary to a
commentator on Shakespeare, you have very successfully followed, and have
consequently superseded some remarks which I