is taste.
Conjectural criticism demands more than humanity possesses, and he that
exercises it with most praise, has very frequent need of indulgence. Let
us now be told no more of the dull duty of an editor.

Confidence is the common consequence of success. They whose excellence of
any kind has been loudly celebrated, are ready to conclude that their
powers are universal. Pope's edition fell below his own expectations, and
he was so much offended, when he was found to have left any thing for
others to do, that he passed the latter part of his life in a state of
hostility with verbal criticism.

I have retained all his notes, that no fragment of so great a writer may
be lost; his preface, valuable alike for elegance of composition and
justness of remark, and containing a general criticism on his author, so
extensive that little can be added, and so exact, that little can be
disputed, every editor has an interest to suppress, but that every reader
would demand its insertion.

Pope was succeeded by Theobald, a man of narrow comprehension and small
acquisitions, with no native and intrinsick splendor of genius, with
little of the artificial light of learning, but zealous for minute
accuracy, and not negligent in pursuing it. He collated the ancient
copies, and rectified many errors. A man so anxiously scrupulous might
have been expected to do more, but what little he did was commonly right.

In his reports of copies and editions he is not to be trusted without
examination. 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. 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 Rowe I have sometimes