I want that gaiety of humour which is required to it.  My conversation is slow and dull; my humour saturnine and reserved:  In short, I am none of those who endeavour to break jests in company, or make repartees.  So that those, who decry my comedies, do me no injury, except it be in point of profit:  reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend.  I beg pardon for entertaining the reader with so ill a subject; but before I quit that argument, which was the cause of this digression, I cannot but take notice how I am corrected for my quotation of Seneca, in my defence of plays in verse.  My words are these:  “Our language is noble, full, and significant; and I know not why he, who is a master of, it, may not clothe ordinary things in it as decently as in the Latin, if he use the same diligence in his choice of words.”  One would think, “unlock a door,” was a thing as vulgar as could be spoken; yet Seneca could make it sound high and lofty in his Latin.

“Reserate clusos regii postes laris.”

But he says of me, “That being filled with the precedents of the ancients, who writ their plays in verse, I commend the thing, declaring our language to be full, noble, and significant, and charging all defects upon the ill placing of words, which I prove by quoting Seneca loftily expressing such an ordinary thing as shutting a door.”

Here he manifestly mistakes; for I spoke not of the placing, but of the choice of words; for which I quoted that aphorism of Julius Caesar, Delectus verborum est origo eloquentiae; but delectus verborum is no more Latin for the placing of words, than reserate is Latin for shut the door, as he interprets it, which I ignorantly construed unlock or open it.

He supposes I was highly affected with the sound of those words, and I suppose I may more justly imagine it of him; for if he had not been extremely satisfied with the sound, he would have minded the sense a little better.

But these are now to be no faults; for ten days after his book is published, and that his mistakes are grown so famous, that they are come back to him, he sends his Errata[A] to be printed, and annexed to his play; and desires, that, instead of shutting, you would read opening, which, it seems, was the printer’s fault.  I wonder at his modesty, that he did not rather say it was Seneca’s or mine; and that, in some authors, reserate was to shut as well as to open, as the word barach, say the learned, is both to bless and curse.

[Footnote A:  This erratum has been suffered to remain in the edition of the Knight’s plays now before us, published in 1692.]