This page has been validated.
( 5 )
inimitable poet, who on moſt occaſions is our beſt inſtructor, you remember, adviſes us, not to "give advantage
"To ſtubborn criticks, apt, without a theme,
"For depravation."
The firſt fact that I ſhall take notice of, is contained in the following paragraph:
"Mr. Malone, in the year 1780, when publiſhing a Supplement to Shakſpeare of plays which he never wrote[1], modeſtly remarked, that
- ↑ This Supplement contained ſeveral additional comments on the author; a correct edition of all his poems, then for the firſt time faithfully printed from the original copies, and illuſtrated with notes; and ſeven plays which had been imputed to him. Theſe I was ſo far from publiſhing as Shakſpeare's, that I expreſsly declared in the preface that of five of them I did not believe a ſingle line to have been written by him; and my deciſion has been fully confirmed by the manuſcripts which I have ſince diſcovered in Dulwich College, in which the names of the four authors of Sir John Oldcaſtle (a play printed in 1600, with Shakſpeare's name at full length in the title-page,) are luckily preſerved.—See the late edition of Shakſpeare, Vol. I. P. II. Emendations and Additions, p. 317.—The writer's meaning, however, as honeſt Sir Hugh Evans ſays, was good; for from the words—"A Supplement to Shakſpeare of plays which he never wrote," the reader would naturally conclude, 1. that this Supplement contained plays only; and 2. that the editor was weak enough to believe them to be the productions of our author, and to aſcribe to him what he never wrote.
'by
