ll draw her from her
watery grave for your edification, I expect a premium from your humane
society for my pains. If not, "you may kill the next Percy yourself." I
am now to solicit your patience, while I recount my adventures, in doing
which I shall ape the dignity rather than the prolixity, of the runaway
prince of Troy, when seated on the high bed of the enamoured queen of
Carthage.

I am, may it please your worship, grand nephew to the renowned Lewis
Theobald, one of those numerous broth-spoiling commentators, who have
smothered poor Shakspeare in the onion sauce of conjectural criticism.
My great uncle was, with reverence be it spoken, a great blockhead; but
that was no fault of his, he being a younger brother, and the family
genius being vested in my grandfather, with remainder to his sons in
tail male. From my earliest childhood I have looked upon Shakspeare as
the real king of England, and the two winter theatres as his proper
palaces. "The period spent on stubborn Troy," has now elapsed, since I
began a commentary on the plays of our immortal bard. O, the rivers of
ink that I have exhausted in cleansing his Augean page from the
black-letter filth heaped upon it by his different commentators! The
task was laborious, but such labour is my delight. The waters of Avon
suit my palate better than Boniface's ale. "I eat my Shakspeare, I drink
my Shakspeare, and (when certain players enact him) I always sleep upon
my Shakspeare."

Apollo was a doctor of physic as well as a doctor of divinity, and
Dryden, we are told, took his physic whenever he wanted to borrow his
inspiration. A dramatic writer of the present day writes tragedy in a
helmet facing a mirror. Ever while you live encourage the imagination!
My faith in Shakspeare is so unbounded, that I verily believe the
hell-broth of Macbeth's witches would, if properly mixed, engender a
real armed head and bloody child. I lately at a great expense, collected
all the materials in my kitchen-copper; I must own the experiment
failed; but I found out the cause. The resurrection man, whom I employed
to get me the "liver of blaspheming Jew," had made free with the corpse
of a very religious man of that persuasion. I must be more careful
another time--but this is foreign to our present purpose.

Having completed my commentary, my parched hopes sighed for the golden
shower, which I expected from presenting my dedication to your worship.
The times were tempting, your two wint