ABSTRACT
Here he gave Mr. Burney Mrs. Williams’s history, and shewed him some volumes of his Shakespeare already printed, to prove that he was in earnest. Upon Mr. Burney’s opening the first volume, at the Merchant of Venice, he observed to him that he seemed to be more severe on Warburton than Theobald. ‘O poor Tib.! (said Johnson) he was ready knocked down to my hands; Warburton stands between me and him.’ ‘But, Sir, (said Mr. Burney,) you’ll have Warburton upon your bones, won’t you?’ ‘No, Sir; he’ll not come out: he’ll only growl in his den.’ ‘But you think, Sir, that Warburton is a superiour critick to Theobald?’—‘O, Sir, he’d make two-and-fifty Theobalds, cut into slices! The worst of Warburton is, that he has a rage for saying something when there’s nothing to be said.’ (I, 299) [1765: Aetat. 56]
In the October of this year he at length gave to the world his edition of Shakespeare, which, if it had no other merit but that of producing his Preface, in which the excellencies and defects of that immortal bard are displayed with a masterly hand, the nation would have had no reason to complain. A blind indiscriminate admiration of Shakespeare had exposed the British nation to the ridicule of foreigners. Johnson, by candidly admitting the faults of his poet, had the more credit in bestowing on him deserved and 1 For Johnson’s comparison of passages in Dryden’s The Indian Emperor or, the Conquest of Mexico and Macbeth, sec his 1745 essay, Vol. 3, pp. 173-4.
