surest way to extend his fame and multiply his readers; unless (like Curll the bookseller, when the Jews spoke Hebrew to him,) they happen to have most faith.in what they least understand, Respecting our author therefore, on fome occafions, we cannot join in the prayer of Cordelia :

It is unlucky for him, perhaps, that between the interest of his readers and his editors a material difference should subist. The former wish to meet with as few difficulties as possible, while the latter are tempted to feek them out, because they afford opportunities for explanatory criticifm.

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Omiffions in our author's works are frequently suspected, and sometimes not without fufficient reason. Yet, in our opinion, they have suffered a more certain injury from interpolation; for almost as often as their measure is deranged, or redundant, some words, alike unnecessary to sense and the grammar of the age, may be discovered, and in a thousand instances, might be expunged, without lofs of a fingle idea meant to be expressed; a liberty which we have sometimes taken, though not (as it is hoped) without constant notice of it to the reader. Enough of this, however, has been already at tempted, to show that more, on the fame plan,

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might be done with safety.* - So far from understanding the power of an ellipfis, we may venture to affirm that the very name of this figure in rhetorick never reached the ears of our ancient editors. Having on this subject the support of Dr. Farmer's acknowledged judgement and experience, we shall not shrink from controversy with those who maintain a different opinion, and refuse to acquiefce in modern suggestions if opposed to the authority of quartos and folios, configned to us by a set of people who were wholly uninstructed in the common forms of style, orthography and punctuation. – We do not therefore hesitate to affirm, that a blind fidelity to the eldest printed copies, is on fome occafions a confirmed treason against the sense, spirit, and verfification of Shakspeare.

All these circumstances confidered, it is time, instead of a timid and servile adherence to ancient copies, when (offending against sense and metre) they furnish no real help, that a future editor, well acquainted with the phraseology of our author's age, should be at liberty to restore some apparent meaning to his corrupted lines, and a decent flow to his obftructed verfification.

The latter (as already has been observed) may be frequently effected by the expulsion of uselefs and fupernumerary fyllables, and an occafional supply of such as might fortuitously have been omitted, notwithstanding the declaration of Hemings and Condell, whose fraudulent preface afferts that they have published our author's plays "as absolute in their numbers as he conceived them." Tillfomewhat resembling the process above suggested, beauthorized, the publick will ask in vain for a commodious and pleasant text of Shakspeare. Nothing will be loft to the world on account of the measure recommended, there being folios and quartos enough remaining for the use of antiquarian or critical travellers, to whom a jolt over a rugged pavement may be more delectable than an easy passage over a smooth one, though they both conduct to the fame object.

To a reader unconverfant with the licences of a theatre, the charge of more material interpolation than that of mere syllables, will appear to want support; and yet whole lines and passages in the following plays incur a very just suspicion of having originated from this practice, which continues even in the present improved state of our dramatick arrangements; for the propenfity of modern performers to alter words, and occasionally introduce ideas incongruous with their author's plan, will not always escape detection. In such vagaries our comedians have been much VOL. I.

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too frequently indulged; but to the injudicious tragical interpolator no degree of favour should be shown, not even to a late Matilda, who, in Mr. Home's Douglas thought fit to change the obfcure intimation with which her part should have concluded

" And such a husband, make a woman bold.

into a plain avowal, that

" And such a husband, drive me to my fate. "

Here we perceive that Fate, the old post-horse of tragedy, has been saddled to expedite intelligence which was meant to be delayed till the necessary moment of its disclosure. Nay, further: the prompter's book being thus corrupted, on the first night of the revival of this beautiful and interesting play at Drury-lane, the same spurious nonsense was heard from the lips of Mrs. Siddons, lips, whose matchless powers should be sacred only to the task of animating the purest strains of dramatick poetry.Many other instances of the same presumption might have been subjoined, had they not been withheld through tenderness to performers now upon the stage. Similar interpolations, however, in the text of Shakspeare, can only be suspected, and therefore must remain unexpelled.

To other defects of our late editions may be fubjoined, as not the least notorious, an exuberance

of comment. Our situation has not unaptly resembled that of the fray in the first scene of Romeo and Juliet :

"While we were interchanging thrusts and blows,

" Came more and more, and fought on part and part:"

till, as Hamlet has observed, we are contending

" Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause."

Indulgence to the remarks of others, as well as partiality to our own; an ambition in each little Hercules to fet up pillars, afcertaining how far he had travelled through the dreary wilds of black letter; and perhaps a reluctance or inability to decide between contradictory sentiments, have also occafioned the appearance of more annotations than were abfolutely wanted, unless it be thought requifite that our author, like a Dauphin Classick, should be reduced to marginal profe for the use of children; that all his various readings (assembled by Mr. Capell) should be enumerated, the genealogies of all his real personages deduced; and that as many of his plays as are founded on Roman or British history, should be attended by complete transcripts from their originals in Sir Thomas North's Plutarch, or the Chronicles of Hall and Holinshed. These faults, indeed, - fi quid prodest delicta fateri, within half a century, (when the present race of voluminous criticks is extinct) cannot fail to be remedied by a judicious and frugal selection from the