solved to insert none of my own readings in the
text. Upon this caution I now congratulate myself, for every day encreases
my doubt of my emendations.

Since I have confined my imagination to the margin, it must not be
considered as very reprehensible, if I have suffered it to play some
freaks in its own dominion. There is no danger in conjecture, if it be
proposed as conjecture; and while the text remains uninjured, those
changes may be safely offered, which are not considered even by him that
offers them as necessary or safe.

If my readings are of little value, they have not been ostentatiously
displayed or importunately obtruded. I could have written longer notes,
for the art of writing notes is not of difficult attainment. The work is
performed, first by railing at the stupidity, negligence, ignorance, and
asinine tastelessness of the former editors, and shewing, from all that
goes before and all that follows, the inelegance and absurdity of the old
reading; then by proposing something, which to superficial readers would
seem specious, but which the editor rejects with indignation; then by
producing the true reading, with a long paraphrase, and concluding with
loud acclamations on the discovery, and a sober wish for the advancement
and prosperity of genuine criticism.

All this may be done, and perhaps done sometimes without impropriety. But
I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires 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.

Criticks I saw, that other's 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 behi