I have received all his notes, and believe that every reader will
wish for more.

Of the last editor it is more difficult to speak. Respect is due
to high place, tenderness to living reputation, and veneration
to genius and learning; but he cannot be justly offended at that
liberty of which he has himself so frequently given an example, nor
very solicitous what is thought of notes, which he ought never to
have considered as part of his serious employments, and which, I
suppose, since the ardour of composition is remitted, he no longer
numbers among his happy effusions.

The original and predominant errour of his commentary, is
acquiescence in his first thoughts; that precipitation which is
produced by consciousness of quick discernment; and that confidence
which presumes to do, by surveying the surface, what labour only
can perform, by penetrating the bottom. His notes exhibit sometimes
perverse interpretations, and sometimes improbable conjectures;
he at one time gives the authour more profundity of meaning than
the sentence admits, and at another discovers absurdities, where
the sense is plain to every other reader. But his emendations are
likewise often happy and just; and his interpretation of obscure
passages learned and sagacious.

Of his notes, I have commonly rejected those, against which the
general voice of the publick has exclaimed, or which their own
incongruity immediately condemns, and which, I suppose, the authour
himself would desire to be forgotten. Of the rest, to part I have
given the highest approbation, by inserting the offered reading
in the text; part I have left to the judgment of the reader, as