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Page 14
Confidence is the common consequence of success. They whose excellence
of any kind has been loudly celebrated, are ready to conclude,
that their powers are universal. Pope's edition fell below his own
expectations, and he was so much offended, when he was found to
have left any thing for others to do, that he past the latter part
of his life in a state of hostility with verbal criticism.
I have retained all his notes, that no fragment of so great a writer
may be lost; his preface, valuable alike for elegance of composition
and justness of remark, and containing a general criticism on his
authour, so extensive that little can be added, and so exact, that
little can be disputed, every editor has an interest to suppress,
but that every reader would demand its insertion.
Pope was succeeded by Theobald, a man of narrow comprehension and
small acquisitions, with no native and intrinsick splendour of
genius, with little of the artificial light of learning, but zealous
for minute accuracy, and not negligent in pursuing it. He collated
the ancient copies, and rectified many errors. A man so anxiously
scrupulous might have been expected to do more, but what little he
did was commonly right.
In his report of copies and editions he is not to be trusted,
without examination. He speaks sometimes indefinitely of copies,
when he has only one. In his enumeration of editions, he mentions
the two first folios as of high, and the third folio as of middle
authority; but the truth is, that the first is equivalent to all
others, and that the rest only deviate from it by the printer's
negligence. Whoever has any of the folios has all, excepting those
diversities which mere reiteration of editions will produce. I
collated them all at the beginning, but afterwards used only the
first.
Of his notes I have generally retained those which he retained
himself in his second edition, except when they were confuted by
subsequent annotators, or were too minute to merit preservation. I
have sometimes adopted his restoration of a comma, without inserting
the panegyrick in which he celebrated himself for his achievement.
The exuberant excrescence of diction I have often lopped, his
triumphant exultations over Pope and Rowe I have sometimes suppressed,
and his contemptible ostentation I have frequently concealed; but
I have in some places shewn him, as he would have shewn himself,
for the reader's diversion, that the inflated emptiness of some
notes may justify or excuse the contraction of the rest.
Theobald, thus weak and ignorant, thus mean and faithless, thus
petulant and ostentatious, by the good luck of having Pope for his
enemy, has escaped, and escaped alone, with reputation, from this
undertaking. So willingly does the world support those who solicite
favour, against those who command reverence; and so easily is he
praised, whom no man can envy.
Our authour fell then into the hands of Sir Thomas Hanmer, the
Oxford editor, a man, in my opinion, eminently qualified by nature
for such studies. He had, what is the first requisite to emendatory
criticism, that intuition by which the poet's intention is immediately
discovered, and that dexterity of intellect which dispatches
its work by the easiest means. He had undoubtedly read much; his
acquaintance with customs, opinions, and traditions, seems to have
been large; and he is often learned without shew. He seldom passes
what he does not understand, without an attempt to find or to make
a meaning, and sometimes hastily makes what a little more attention
would have found. He is solicitous to reduce to grammar, what
he could not be sure that his authour intended to be grammatical.
Shakespeare regarded more the series of ideas, than of words; and
his language, not being designed for the reader's desk, was all
that he desired it to be, if it conveyed his meaning to the audience.
Hanmer's care of the metre has been too violently censured. He found
the measures reformed in so many passages, by the silent labours
of some editors, with the silent acquiescence of the rest, that
he thought himself allowed to extend a little further the license,
which had already been carried so far without reprehension; and
of his corrections in general, it must be confessed, that they are
often just, and made commonly with the least possible violation of
the text.
But, by inserting his emendations, whether invented or borrowed, into
the page, without any notice of varying copies, he has appropriated
the labour of his predecessors, and made his own edition of little
authority. His confidence indeed, both in himself and others, was
too great; he supposes all to be right that was done by Pope and
Theobald; he seems not to suspect a critick of fallibility, and it
was but reasonable that he should claim what he so liberally granted.
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