d a place here"
(_id._ ii., pp. 621, 622).

This confession of weakness is valuable in the light of Warburton's
Preface to his own edition of 1747. His statement of the assistance he
rendered Theobald is rude and cruel, but it is easier to impugn his taste
than his truthfulness. Theobald did not merely ask for assistance in the
Preface; he received it too. Warburton expressed himself on this matter,
with his customary force and with a pleasing attention to detail, in a
letter to the Rev. Thomas Birch on 24th November, 1737. "You will see in
Theobald's heap of disjointed stuff," he says, "which he calls a Preface
to Shakespeare, an observation upon those poems [_i.e._ _L'Allegro_ and
_Il Penseroso_] which I made to him, and which he did not understand, and
so has made it a good deal obscure by contracting my note; for you must
understand that almost all that Preface (except what relates to
Shakespeare's Life, and the foolish Greek conjectures at the end) was made
up of notes I sent him on particular passages, and which he has there
stitched together without head or tail" (Nichols, ii., p. 81). The Preface
is indeed a poor piece of patch-work. Examination of the footnotes
throughout the edition corroborates Warburton's concluding statement. Some
of the annotations which have his name attached to them are repeated
almost verbatim (_e.g._ the note in _Love's Labour's Lost_ on the use of
music), while the comparison of Addison and Shakespeare is taken from a
letter written by Warburton to Concanen in 1726-7 (_id._ ii., pp. 195,
etc.). The inequality of the essay--the fitful succession of limp and acute
observations--can be explained only by ill-matched collaboration.

Warburton has himself indicated the extent of Theobald's debt to him. In
his own copy of Theobald's Shakespeare he marked the passages which he had
contributed to the Preface, as well as the notes "which Theobald deprived
him of and made his own," and the volume is now in the Capell collection
in Trinity College, Cambridge. Mr. Churton Collins, in his attempt to
prove Theobald the greatest of Shakespearean editors, has said that "if in
this copy, which we have not had the opportunity of inspecting, Warburton
has laid claim to more than Theobald has assigned to him, we believe him
to be guilty of dishonesty even more detestable than that of which the
proofs are, as we have shown, indisputable."(33) An inspection of the
Cambridge volume is not necessary to