Burd—Eight Unedited Letters of Joseph Ritson 
9 
and Reed rather awkwardly exonerated. It was then that 
Reed flatly disclaimed the notes by which Ritson had felt him¬ 
self to be most injured. The critic’s reasons for his con¬ 
clusions and his sincere desire to avoid a break with his friend 
are eloquently set forth in this reply to Reed. 14) 
Perry MS. 
Dear Sir, 
I plainly perceive that the little pamphlet I have pub¬ 
lished 15) will be productive of a consequence which it must 
be evident I have sought to avoid, & for which I shall be very 
sorry. 
That I have often thought and said that the notes at which 
I have taken offense could not possibly proceed from you is 
a fact well known. I declared my belief of it to yourself in 
the letter I wrote soon after the publication of your Shaks- 
peare; 16)—you could then, I thought, so easily have un¬ 
deceived me, that your silence tended to authorize & confirm 
my belief. I cannot however doubt the assertion you now 
make — but I am more and more at a loss to account for the 
language and manner of your notes which so far as you were 
personally concerned were without the least provocation on 
my side and could not fail to give the most unfavorable im¬ 
pression of my character to every one who knew who was 
meant by the Author of the Remarks. It would surely have 
been generous & friendly at the least to have afforded me an 
opportunity of defending myself against the charges you 
thought me liable to, before the publication of the book, that 
I might have had a chance of convincing you that the Re¬ 
marks objected to were neither so false nor so foolish as they 
were represented. 17) You adopted a mode of conduct which 
it would have been perfectly natural for me to expect from 
A more complete account of the Shakespearean controversy will be found 
in my article on “Joseph Ritson and Some Eighteenth Century Editors of 
Shakespeare’’, in Shakespeare Studies by Members of the Department of 
English of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1916, pp. 253-75. 
^ Quip Modest. 
See letter to Reed, Jan. 19, 1786, in Ritson’s Letters, Vol. I, pp. 105-8. 
This was characteristic of Ritson in controversy. He was always the 
last to allow his “victim” an opportunity of defense against attack and the 
first to demand it when the weapons were turned upon himself. 
