refore is not to be disturbed
for the sake of elegance, perspicuity or mere improvement of the sense.
For though much credit is not due to the fidelity, nor any to the
judgment of the first publishers, yet they who had the copy before
their eyes were more likely to read it right than we who read it only
by imagination." And in several other matters he in passing dropped a
seed which has ripened in other minds to the great increase of our
knowledge. "Shakespeare," he says, "has more allusions than other
poets to the traditions and superstition of the vulgar, which must
therefore be traced before he can be understood." Few critical seeds
have had a larger growth than this: and the same may be said of the
pregnant hint about the frequent necessity of looking for Shakespeare's
meaning "among the sports of the field." He neither overestimated the
importance nor under-estimated the difficulties of the critic of
Shakespeare. With his usual sense of the true scale of things he
treats the quarrels of commentators with contempt: "it is not easy to
discover from what cause the acrimony of a scholiast can naturally
proceed. The subjects to be discussed by him are of very small
importance: they involve neither property nor liberty"; and in another
place {217} he characteristically bids his angry colleagues to join
with him in remembering amidst their triumphs over the "nonsensical"
opinions of dead rivals that "we likewise are men: that _debemur
morti_, and, as Swift observed to Burnet, we shall soon be among the
dead ourselves." He knows too that "notes are necessary evils" and
advises the young reader to begin by ignoring them and letting
Shakespeare have his way alone. But at the same time he puts aside
with just indignation Pope's supercilious talk about the "dull duty of
an editor"; and after giving an admirable summary of what that dull
duty is, declares that one part of it alone, the business of
conjectural criticism, "demands more than humanity possesses." Yet it
is that part of his functions, the part which appeals most to vanity,
that he exercised with the most sparing caution. He saw that it was
not in emendation but in interpretation that the critic could now be
most useful. For this last task the sanity of his mind, though
sometimes leaning too much to prose, gave him peculiar qualifications.
No one can have used any of the Variorum Shakespeares without being
struck again and again by the masterly way in which