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Page 15
As he never writes without careful enquiry and diligent consideration,
I have received all his notes, and believe that every reader will
wish for more.
Of the last editor it is more difficult to speak. Respect is due
to high place, tenderness to living reputation, and veneration
to genius and learning; but he cannot be justly offended at that
liberty of which he has himself so frequently given an example, nor
very solicitous what is thought of notes, which he ought never to
have considered as part of his serious employments, and which, I
suppose, since the ardour of composition is remitted, he no longer
numbers among his happy effusions.
The original and predominant errour of his commentary, is
acquiescence in his first thoughts; that precipitation which is
produced by consciousness of quick discernment; and that confidence
which presumes to do, by surveying the surface, what labour only
can perform, by penetrating the bottom. His notes exhibit sometimes
perverse interpretations, and sometimes improbable conjectures;
he at one time gives the authour more profundity of meaning than
the sentence admits, and at another discovers absurdities, where
the sense is plain to every other reader. But his emendations are
likewise often happy and just; and his interpretation of obscure
passages learned and sagacious.
Of his notes, I have commonly rejected those, against which the
general voice of the publick has exclaimed, or which their own
incongruity immediately condemns, and which, I suppose, the authour
himself would desire to be forgotten. Of the rest, to part I have
given the highest approbation, by inserting the offered reading
in the text; part I have left to the judgment of the reader, as
doubtful, though specious; and part I have censured without reserve,
but I am sure without bitterness of malice, and, I hope, without
wantonness of insult.
It is no pleasure to me, in revising my volumes, to observe how much
paper is wasted in confutation. Whoever considers the revolutions
of learning, and the various questions of greater or less importance,
upon which wit and reason have exercised their powers, must lament
the unsuccessfulness of enquiry, and the slow advances of truth,
when he reflects, that great part of the labour of every writer is
only the destruction of those that went before him. The first care
of the builder of a new system, is to demolish the fabricks which
are standing. The chief desire of him that comments an authour,
is to shew how much other commentators have corrupted and obscured
him. The opinions prevalent in one age, as truths above the reach
of controversy, are confuted and rejected in another, and rise again
to reception in remoter times. Thus the human mind is kept in motion
without progress. Thus sometimes truth and errour, and sometimes
contrarieties of errour, take each other's place by reciprocal
invasion. The tide of seeming knowledge which is poured over one
generation, retires and leaves another naked and barren; the sudden
meteors of intelligence which for a while appear to shoot their
beams into the regions of obscurity, on a sudden withdraw their
lustre, and leave mortals again to grope their way.
These elevations and depressions of renown, and the contradictions
to which all improvers of knowledge must for ever be exposed, since
they are not escaped by the highest and brightest of mankind, may
surely be endured with patience by criticks and annotators, who
can rank themselves but as the satellites of their authours. How
canst thou beg for life, says Achilles to his captive, when thou
knowest that thou art now to suffer only what must another day be
suffered by Achilles?
Dr. Warburton had a name sufficient to confer celebrity on those
who could exalt themselves into antagonists, and his notes have
raised a clamour too loud to be distinct. His chief assailants
are the authours of the Canons of Criticism and of the Review of
Shakespeare's Text; of whom one ridicules his errours with airy
petulance, suitable enough to the levity of the controversy; the
other attacks them with gloomy malignity, as if he were dragging
to justice an assassin or incendiary. The one stings like a fly,
sucks a little blood, takes a gay flutter, and returns for more; the
other bites like a viper, and would be glad to leave inflammations
and gangrene behind him. When I think on one, with his confederates,
I remember the danger of Coriolanus, who was afraid that "girls
with spits, and boys with stones, should slay him in puny battle;"
when the other crosses my imagination, I remember the prodigy in
"Macbeth",
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