jecture. Truth is always worth some trouble in the pursuit. So thought Dr. Johnson. He praises the judge I have just quoted (Lord Hailes) “as a man of worth, a scholar, and wit, whose exactness excites my wonder . . . whose book (Annals of Scotland) has such a stability of dates, such a certainty of facts, and such a punctuality of citation,” &c. These are precisely the merits of Malone. They will be the merits of every one who has courage to quit the hard-trodden path of commonplace book makers and will plunge for knowledge into an exploratory track of his own.
Qualities which had drawn the commendation of Johnson, were not permitted by one of the supposed “wits” of the age, Mr. George Hardinge, to pass muster in the Life of Dryden. Wits are seldom noted for being exact or particular in anything. Precision with them is akin to offence. So on the present occasion the censor made minute detail the subject of ridicule in a bulky pamphlet, The Essence of Malone. This was followed by another; and again by a similar piece levelled at Shakspeare.
A jest at an antiquary may occasionally run happily enough; but expanded to two or three hundred pages becomes the butt of the ridicule it is meant to convey. Jests of such length are found to be no jests at all; on the contrary, they are serious taxes on patience. He that reads them will suspect spleen, cavilling, envy, captiousness to be the basis of the performance—especially when, as in this instance, the page is studded with such a crop of notes of admiration and interrogation, as if much of the wit
