His next letter, which contains the list of acknowledgements substantially as printed, thanks Warburton for consenting to give the requested help, announces that he is himself busy about "the Contents... wch. I am Endeavouring to modell in my Head, in Order to communicate them to you, for your Directions & refinement," indicates that he has "already rough-hewn the Exordium & Conclusion," and asserts that "What I shall send you from Time to Time, I look upon only as Materials: wch I hope may grow into a fine Building, under your judicious Management" (Jones, _op. cit._, pp. 283-84). Warburton apparently misunderstood or overlooked Theobald's remarks about materials, for in his next letter Theobald was obliged to return, somewhat ambiguously, to the same point: I make no Question of my being wrong in the disjointed Parts of my Preface, but my Intention was, (after I had given you the Conclusion, & the Manner in wch. I meant to start) to give you a List of all the other general Heads design'd to be handled, then to transmit to you, at proper Leisure, my rough Working off of each respective Head, that you might have the Trouble only of refining & embellishing wth: additional Inrichments: of the general Arrangement, wch. you should think best for the whole; & of making the proper Transitions from Subject to Subject, wch. I account no inconsiderable Beauty (_Ibid._, pp. 289-90). Finally on January 10, 1733, Theobald wrote Warburton: "I promise myself now shortly to sit down upon ye fine Synopsis, wch. you so modestly call the Skeleton of Preface" (_Ibid._, p. 310). It is clear from the foregoing that Theobald wrote most of the Preface topic by topic, and probably followed the plan for the general structure as submitted by Warburton. Yet it is equally clear that certain parts of the Preface, such as the contrast between _Julius Caesar_ and Addison's _Cato_, which Warburton later claimed as his and which Theobald omitted from his second edition, were furnished Theobald as "additional Inrichments" (D.N. Smith, _Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare_, 1903, pp. xlviii-ix). When later a break did occur between the two men, neither was free from blame. Theobald had asked and got so much help with the Preface that he should have acknowledged the debt, no matter how naked it might have made him seem. Warburton, on the other hand, had had honest warning that acknowledgement would not be made for this part of his help; and if his synopsis were followed, as seems likely, his condemnation of the Preface as "Theobald's heap of disjointed stuff" was disingenuous, to say the least. Far less defensible was his assertion in the same letter to Thomas Birch that, apart from the section on Greek texts, virtually the entire Preface was stitched together from notes which he had supplied (Nichols, _Illustrations_, II, 81).