Perhaps I may not be more censured for doing wrong, than for doing little; for raising in the publick expectations, which at last I have not answered.  The expectation of ignorance is indefinite, and that of knowledge is often tyrannical.  It is hard to satisfy those who know not what to demand, or those who demand by design what they think impossible to be done.  I have indeed disappointed no opinion more than my own; yet I have endeavoured to perform my task with no slight solicitude.  Not a single passage in the whole work has appeared to me corrupt, which I have not attempted to restore; or obscure, which I have not endeavoured to illustrate.  In many I have failed like others, and from many, after all my efforts, I have retreated, and confessed the repulse.  I have not passed over, with affected superiority, what is equally difficult to the reader and to myself, but where I could not instruct him, have owned my ignorance.  I might easily have accumulated a mass of seeming learning upon easy scenes; but it ought not to be imputed to negligence, that, where nothing was necessary, nothing has been done, or that, where others have said enough, I have said no more.

Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils.  Let him, that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators.  When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or explanation.  When his attention is strongly engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theobald and of Pope.  Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable.  And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness, and read the commentators.

Particular passages are cleared by notes, but the general effect of the work is weakened.  The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.

Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work in its full design and its true proportions; a close approach shews the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer It is not very grateful to consider how little the succession of editors has added to this authour’s power of pleasing.  He was read, admired, studied, and imitated, while he was yet deformed with all the improprieties which ignorance and neglect could accumulate upon him; while the reading was yet not rectified, nor his allusions understood; yet then did Dryden pronounce “that Shakespeare was the man,