the amiable and elegant Hanmer with tooth and claw. His extravagance in the use of words led him often into unfairness and inaccuracy. He amused while he repelled. He carried the personalities of criticism to the extreme. For example, when in speaking of Theobald he said, "What he read he could transcribe, but, as what he thought, if ever he did think, he could but ill express, so he read on." Posterity judging between the two forgot Warburton and Pope as critics and bought several editions of Theobald. It is amusing to find such a writer saying that an "odd humour of finding fault hath long prevailed among critics, as if nothing were worth remarking that did not at the same time deserve to be reproved.'

The chief value of Warburton's Preface is his statement of the principles upon which textual criticism should proceed, which we may endorse to the student as sound and wholesome, although their author did not always act upon them with consistency.

Dr. Samuel Johnson's Introduction to his edition of the plays in 1765, while ponderous in style, and occasionally whimsical in sentiment, is, in my judgment, the most valuable critical estimate of Shakespeare's genius which the eighteenth century produced. From some

of his literary judgments we are bound to dissent. His assertion, for instance, that Shakespeare's natural bent was in the line of comedy, so that "In tragedy he often writes with great appearance of toil and study what is written at last with little felicity."

Shakespeare's genius illuminated human life. In the broadest sense he wrote neither comedy nor tragedy, but interpreted men and women whose dealings with earth and time resulted in one or other or both. But the poet

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seems to me to be equally at home in both phases of life. Desdemona does not seem to be less naturally studied than Rosalind. "King Lear" and "Macbeth" are as spontaneous as "Twelfth Night," and far more so than the "Midsummer Night's Dream." But Johnson declares that "His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct." It is true that tragedy involves a more arduous toil, as it is a superior form of composition, but Shakespeare is surely as spontaneous in one as the other, and I do not think that the judgment of the ages acquiesces in the dictum that " In his tragic scenes there is always something wanting, his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire."

The most whimsical of Dr. Johnson's utterances concerns the part played by love in Shakespearean drama. "Love," he says, "is only one of many passions, and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life it has little operation in the dramas of a poet who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him." The italics are mine. The widow Porter was twenty years older than himself when Johnson took her to wife, but he is reported to have lived very happily with her, so this remarkable sentence must be taken as the result of general observation rather than a personal experience. I confess it is to me the most astounding adjudication in English letters. Love with one or more of its "spontaneous variations " is the theme of almost every comedy, of one third of the tragedies, and even plays no small part in many of the historical plays. As to the passion of love having no great influence upon the sum of life, if it were possible to withdraw that influence, there would be little but rags and tatters left.

Another judgment in which we cannot concur is

that Shakespeare's "declamation or set speeches are commonly cold and weak in which he seldom escapes without the pity or resentment of the reader." We at once recall the grandeur of monologue which characterises" Richard II."; the whirling passion of "Julius Cæsar" and "Antony and Cleopatra "; the biting cynicism of "Richard III.," and wonder if Dr. Johnson did more than glance through the plays in order to see how the plot came to its dénouement.

In his other unfavourable comments upon, for instance, the quibbles with words, grossness of the comic parts, and lack of delicacy in his ladies and gentlemen, the critic half admitted that he was really criticising the manners and customs of the Elizabethan age from which Shakespeare drew his working models.

Every critic, however, feels bound to censure here and there in order to justify his existence, and Dr. Johnson redeems the most extraordinary and whimsical of his utterances by certain excellencies of interpretation and shrewd common sense judgments.

His defence of Shakespearean violation of the unities of the classic drama is not an apology in the vein of Pope, but a reconstruction of the theory of the drama. He strikes at the root of the claim that an observance of the unities is necessary to make the drama credible, in the sentence: "Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation; if the spectator can be once persuaded that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Cæsar, or that a room illuminated with candles, is the plain of Pharsalia, or the bank of the Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry, may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There

is no reason why a mind thus wandering in ecstacy should count the clock, or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the brain's that can make the stage a field.”

Shakespearean dramas offer a proof in themselves, and the developments of the later drama buttress this proof," that the unities of time and place are not necessary to a great drama," and Dr. Johnson led the way to a juster estimate of the works of the great poet, by relieving them on sound, critical grounds from the incubus of irregularity which seventeenth and eighteenth century critics insisted upon saddling upon them.

The shrewd mind of the great man perceived a truth to which so many before and after him seemed curiously blind, that the learning and knowledge of Shakespeare, as already noted, were to be attributed to the sources of his plays; "I am inclined to believe," he says, "that he read little more than English, and chose for his fables only such tales as he found translated."

Modern research has caused no material alteration of this judgment. We have access to Shakespeare's library in more than one exhaustive collection, and the student of these sources has no difficulty in accounting for the knowledge and learning displayed throughout the plays. This is not to say that the poet was unlearned, but that he need not have been learned in either the languages or sciences to have written the works attributed to him.

Dr. Johnson added to his own comments a brief but judicious review of the editorial work which preceded his own, bestowing praise and blame with impartial pen, save as it seems to me in his criticism of Theobald. The literary atmosphere which he breathed was charged with

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a malignant spirit towards that unfortunate editor. It will be noticed, however, that those who criticised Theobald's vanity, his petulance and his learning, availed themselves of the results of his labour with no niggardly hand, and Johnson proved no exception.

Dr. Johnson's observations form, on the whole, the best and finest critical estimate of Shakespeare's works which the eighteenth century produced, and whether we agree with him or not in every judgment, we cannot fail to be enlightened by his many-syllabled sentences.

His advice to the average reader is sound and helpful. It is summed up in a conclusion which I am proud to remember was the result of my own judgment long before I saw it so happily expressed by so great an authority: "Let him that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play from the first scene to the last with utter negligence of all his commentators."

It was thus that the audience who first saw these plays presented received their impressions. It is only so that modern readers can have original opinions. The herd-mind is not desirable. Every reader should be his own commentator, which is merely another way for saying that everyone should be able to form an independent judgment as to characters and events. Great names should not stand in the way. A very average-minded man has made within a few years one of the most luminous comments on a line in Shakespeare which has been uttered in a generation:

"Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed." Get the story in hand. Have a grasp of the plot. Then pay a closer attention to details, and