ions, 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, their negligence and
unskilfulness has by the late revisers been sufficiently shewn. 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 stile 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 errors;
they were perhaps sometimes mutilated by the actors, for the sake of
shortening the speeches; and were at last printed without correction of
the press.

In this state they remained, not, as Dr. Warburton supposes, because they
were unregarded, but because the editor's art was not yet applied to
modern languages, and our ancestors were accustomed to so much negligence
of English printers, that they could very patiently endure it. At last an
edition was undertaken by Rowe; not because a poet was to be published by
a poet, for Rowe seems to have thought very little on correction or
explanation, but that our author's works might appear like those of his
fraternity, with the appendages of a life and recommendatory preface. Rowe
has been clamorously blamed for not performing what he did not undertake,
and it is time that justice be done him, by confessing that though he
seems to have had no thought of corruption beyond the printer's errors,
yet he has made many emendations, if they were not made before, which his
successors have received without acknowledg