If my readings are of little value, they have not been ostentatiously displayed or importunately obtruded.  I could have written longer notes, for the art of writing notes is not of difficult attainment.  The work is performed, first by railing at the stupidity, negligence, ignorance, and asinine tastelessness of the former editors, and showing, from all that goes before and all that follows, the inelegance and absurdity of the old reading; then by proposing something, which to superficial readers would seem specious, but which the editor rejects with indignation; then by producing the true reading, with a long paraphrase, and concluding with loud acclamations on the discovery, and a sober wish for the advancement and prosperity of genuine criticism.

All this may be done, and, perhaps, done sometimes without impropriety.  But I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many words to prove it wrong; and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so much labour appear to be right.  The justness of a happy restoration strikes at once, and the moral precept may be well applied to criticism, “quod dubitas ne feceris.”

To dread the shore which he sees spread with wrecks, is natural to the sailor.  I had before my eye so many critical adventures ended in miscarriage, that caution was forced upon me.  I encountered in every page, wit struggling with its own sophistry, and learning confused by the multiplicity of its views.  I was forced to censure those whom I admired, and could not but reflect, while I was dispossessing their emendations, how soon the same fate might happen to my own, and how many of the readings which I have corrected may be, by some other editor, defended and established.

Critics I saw, that others’ names efface,
And fix their own, with labour, in the place;
Their own, like others, soon their place resign’d,
Or disappear’d, and left the first behind. 

          
                                                          POPE.

That a conjectural critick should often be mistaken, cannot be wonderful, either to others or himself, if it be considered, that in his art there is no system, no principal and axiomatical truth that regulates subordinate positions.  His chance of errour is renewed at every attempt; an oblique view of the passage, a slight misapprehension of a phrase, a casual inattention to the parts connected, is sufficient to make him not only fail, but fail ridiculously; and when he succeeds best, he produces, perhaps, but one reading of many probable, and he that suggests another will always be able to dispute his claims.

It is an unhappy state, in which danger is hid under pleasure.  The allurements of emendation are scarcely resistible.  Conjecture has all the joy and all the pride of invention, and he that has once started a happy change, is too much delighted to consider what objections may rise against it.