Cursory Criticisms on the Edition of Shakspeare, published by Edmund Malone on Joseph Ritson

“Now Mr. Malone will take this exceedingly ill; for Mr. Malone has a very high opinion of himself, and a very mean one of every body else. But I confess I do not seek to please Mr. Malone: I wish to rescue the language and sense of an admirable author from the barbarism and corruption they have acquired in passing through the hands of this incompetent and unworthy editor. In a word, I mean to convict and not to convince him.”

“But it is not the want of ear and judgement only of which I have to accuse Mr. Malone: he stands charged with divers other high crimes and misdemeanors against the divine majesty of our sovereign lord of the drama; with deforming his text, and degrading his margin, by intentional corruption, flagrant misrepresentation, malignant hypercriticism, and unexampled scurrility. These charges shall be proved--not, as Mr. Malone proves things, by groundless opinion and confident assertion, but--by fact, argument, and demonstration. How sayest thou, culprit? Guilty or not guilty?”

“Mr. Malone can not read, and is totally ignorant of the consequences of his own absurd ideas; he could never else have thought such a line as the following consistent with the laws of metre: '"What wheels? Racks? fi-ers? What flaying? boiling?' Thus, however, he insists that Shakespeare intended us to read--swor-en, char-rums, instead of sworn, charms; su-ar, for sure, &c. &c. converting one syllable into two, two into three or four and so on.”

“Every reader of this incomparable edition will have frequent occasion to observe that the editor "draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument." The present instance, indeed, is nothing in comparison to pages of inanity with which the work abounds, and which, on account of their "true no-meaning," are actually incapable of refutation or discussion.”