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 errours.  A man so anxiously scrupulous might have been expected to do more, but what little he did was commonly right.

In his reports 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[19].  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 his diction I have often lopped, his triumphant exultations over Pope and Howe I have sometimes suppressed, and his contemptible ostentation I have frequently concealed; but I have in some places shown him, as he would have shown 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 solicit favour against those who command reverence; and so easily is he praised whom no man can envy.

Our author 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 despatches 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 show.  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 author 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.