1 DAVID GARRICK, Efq. T HERE is no perfon whose patronage a Work of this kind may so properly claim, as Your's; Your private life having done so much honour to the moral part, and Your public one fuch justice to the principal Characters, represented in our Author's writings. Your action has been a better comment on his Text, than all his Editors have been able to fupply. You mark his beauties; They but clear his blots. You impress us with the living spirit; They only present us the dead letter. There is one striking similarity between Shakespeare and You, in a very uncommon particular: He is the only Dramatic Writer, who ever alike ex celled in Tragedy and Comedy; and we may without flattery venture to affim, That you are the only Performer who ever appeared with equal advantage, both in the Sock and Buskin. \ If I had an higher opinion of this Work than I have, I should have still but an higher inducement for addressing it to You. From this confideration You are bound to receive it, with all its imperfections on its head, being offered as a tribute of that friendship and esteem with which I have the honour to be, PREFACE. : A MONG the many writers of our nation, who have by their talents contributed to entertain, inform, or improve our minds, no one has so happily or universally succeeded, as he whom we may justly stile our first, our greatest Poet, Shakespeare. For more than a century and a half, this Author has been the delight of the Ingenious, the text of the Moralist, and the study of the Philosopher. Even his cotemporary writers have ingenuously yielded their plaudit to his fame, as not presuming it could lessen theirs, set at so great a distance. Such superior excellence could never be brought into a comparative light; and jealousy is dumb, when competition must be vain. For him, then, they chearfully twined the laurel-wreath, and unrepining placed it on his brow; where it will ever bloom, while sense, taste, and natural feelings of the heart, shall remain amongst the characteristics of this, or any other nation, that can be able to construe his language. He is a Claffic, and cotemporary with all ages. True Nature's Drama represents all time; A 3 But But amidst all this burst of applause, one fingle But he unfairly tries him by Pe- But as it may shew more impartiality upon "the |