was yet deformed with all the
improprieties which ignorance and neglect could accumulate upon him; while
the reading was yet not rectified, nor his allusions understood; yet then
did Dryden pronounce, "that Shakespeare was the man, who, of all modern
and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul."
All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not
laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see
it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give
him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned: he needed not the
spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her
there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him
injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat
and insipid; his comick wit degenerating into clenches, his serious
swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is
presented to him: no man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit,
and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,

Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.

It is to be lamented that such a writer should want a commentary; that his
language should become obsolete, or his sentiments obscure. But it is vain
to carry wishes beyond the condition of human things; that which must
happen to all, has happened to Shakespeare, by accident and time: and more
than has been suffered by any other writer since the use of types, has
been suffered by him through his own negligence of fame, or perhaps by
that superiority of mind, which despised its own performances, when it
compared them with its powers, and judged those works unworthy to be
preserved, which the criticks of following ages were to contend for the
fame of restoring and explaining.

Among these candidates of inferior fame, I am now to stand the judgment of
the publick; and wish that I could confidently produce my commentary as
equal to the encouragement which I have had the honour of receiving. Every
work of this kind is by its nature deficient, and I should feel little
solicitude about the sentence, were it to be pronounced only by the
skilful and the learned.

RICHARD FARMER: AN ESSAY ON THE LEARNING OF SHAKESPEARE: ADDRESSED TO
JOSEPH CRADOCK, ESQ. 1767.

Preface to the Second Edition, 1767.

THE AUTHOR of the following ESSAY was solicitous only for the honour