certainly he is not so in this instance) partly from his own nature, and partly from judgment. For men of judgment think they do any man more service in praising him justly, than lavishly. I say, I would fain believe they were Friends, tho’ the violence and ill-breeding of their Followers and Flatterers were enough to give rise to the contrary report. I would hope that it may be with _Parties_, both in Wit and State, as with those Monsters described by the Poets; and that their _Heads_ at least may have something humane, tho’ their _Bodies_ and _Tails_ are wild beasts and serpents. As I believe that what I have mentioned gave rise to the opinion of _Shakespear_’s want of learning; so what has continued it down to us may have been the many blunders and illiteracies of the first Publishers of his works. In these Editions their ignorance shines almost in every page; nothing is more common than _Actus tertia_, _Exit Omnes_, _Enter three Witches solus_. Their French is as bad as their _Latin_, both in construction and spelling: Their very _Welsh_ is false. Nothing is more likely than that those palpable blunders of _Hector_’s quoting _Aristotle_, with others of that gross kind, sprung from the same root: It not being at all credible that these could be the errors of any man who had the least tincture of a School, or the least conversation with such as had. _Ben Johnson_ (whom they will not think partial to him) allows him at least to have had _some Latin_; which is utterly inconsistent with mistakes like these. Nay the constant blunders in proper names of persons and places, are such as must have proceeded from a man who had not so much as read any history, in any language: so could not be _Shakespear_’s. I shall now lay before the reader some of those almost innumerable Errors which have risen from one source, the ignorance of the Players, both as his actors, and as his editors. When the nature and kinds of these are enumerated and considered, I dare to say that not _Shakespear_ only, but _Aristotle_ or _Cicero_, had their works undergone the same fate, might have appear’d to want sense as well as learning.