canst thou beg for life, says Achilles to his captive, when thou
knowest that thou art now to suffer only what must another day be
suffered by Achilles?

Dr. Warburton had a name sufficient to confer celebrity on those
who could exalt themselves into antagonists, and his notes have
raised a clamour too loud to be distinct. His chief assailants
are the authours of the Canons of Criticism and of the Review of
Shakespeare's Text; of whom one ridicules his errours with airy
petulance, suitable enough to the levity of the controversy; the
other attacks them with gloomy malignity, as if he were dragging
to justice an assassin or incendiary. The one stings like a fly,
sucks a little blood, takes a gay flutter, and returns for more; the
other bites like a viper, and would be glad to leave inflammations
and gangrene behind him. When I think on one, with his confederates,
I remember the danger of Coriolanus, who was afraid that "girls
with spits, and boys with stones, should slay him in puny battle;"
when the other crosses my imagination, I remember the prodigy in
"Macbeth",

An eagle tow'ring in his pride of place,
was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and kill'd.

Let me however do them justice. One is a wit, and one a scholar.
They have both shewn acuteness sufficient in the discovery of
faults, and have both advanced some probable interpretations of
obscure passages; but when they aspire to conjecture and emendation,
it appears how falsely we all estimate our own abilities, and the
little which they have been able to perform might have taught them
more candour to the endeavours of others.