read, to observe what the
poet observed. This was at once throwing himself and the reader back
into an age, of which even the likeness had disappeared, and
familiarising us with distant objects, which had been lost to us in
the haze and mists of time. For this, not only a new mode of
travelling, but a new road was to be opened; the secret history, the
fugitive pamphlet, the obsolete satire, the ancient comedy--such were
the many curious volumes whose dust was to be cleared away, to cast a
new radiance on the fading colours of a moveable picture of manners;
the wittiest ever exhibited to mankind. This new mode of research,
even at this moment, is imperfectly comprehended, still ridiculed even
by those who could never have understood a writer who will only be
immortal in the degree he is comprehended--and whose wit could not
have been felt but for the laborious curiosity of him whose "reading"
has been too often aspersed for "such reading"

As was never read.

Grey was outrageously attacked by all the wits, first by Warburton, in
his preface to Shakspeare, who declares that "he hardly thinks there
ever appeared so execrable a heap of nonsense under the name of
commentaries, as hath been lately given us on a certain satyric poet
of the last age." It is odd enough, Warburton had himself contributed
towards these very notes, but, for some cause which has not been
discovered, had quarrelled with Dr. Grey. I will venture a conjecture
on this great conjectural critic. Warburton was always meditating to
give an edition of his own of our old writers, and the sins he
committed against Shakspeare he longed to practise on Butler, whose
times were, indeed, a favourite period of his researches. Grey had
anticipated him, and though Warburton had half reluctantly yielded the
few notes he had prepared, his proud heart sickened when he beheld
the amazing subscription Grey obtained for his first edition of
"Hudibras;" he received for that work 1500_l._[75]--a proof that this
publication was felt as a want by the public.

Such, however, is one of those blunt, dogmatic censures in which
Warburton abounds, to impress his readers with the weight of his
opinions; this great man wrote more for effect than any other of our
authors, as appears by his own or some friend's confession, that if
his edition of Shakspeare did no honour to that bard, this was not the
design of the commentator--which was only to do honour to himself by a
display of