I had before my eye, so many critical adventures ended in miscarriage, that caution was forced upon me.

I encountered in every page Wit struggling with its own sophistry, and Learning confused by the multiplicity of its views.

I was forced to censure those whom I admired, and could not but reflect, while I was dispossessing their emendations, how soon the same fate might happen to my own, and how many of the readings which I have corrected may be by some other editor defended and established.
Criticks, I saw, that other's names efface, And fix their own, with labour, in the place; Their own, like others, soon their place resign'd, Or disappear'd, and left the first behind, POPE.
That a conjectural critick should often be mistaken, cannot be wonderful, either to others or himself, if it be considered, that in his art there is no system, no principal and axiomatical truth that regulates subordinate positions.

His chance of errour is renewed at every attempt; an oblique view of the passage, a slight misapprehension of a phrase, a casual inattention to the parts connected, is sufficient to make him not only fails, but fail ridiculously; and when he succeeds best, he produces perhaps but one reading of many probable, and he that suggests another will always be able to dispute his claims.
It is an unhappy state, in which danger is hid under pleasure.

The allurements of emendation are scarcely resistible.