The critic, however, probably Gildon, owned himself sensible that he should raise anger of the uncultivated English people by what he was saying, and meant further to say, upon the faults of Shakespeare. Lucilius, he adds, was the incorrect idol of Roman times, Shakespeare of ours. Both gained their reputation from a people unacquainted with art; and that reputation was a sort of traditionary authority, looked upon to be so sacred, that Horace among the Romans, in a much more polite age than that in which Lucilius writ, could not escape their censure for attacking him; nor can Mr. Rymer, or any other just critic, who shall presume, though with the highest justice and reason, to find fault with Shakespeare, escape the indignation of our modern traditionary admirers of that poet.' Rymer himself, forty years earlier, had been even more emphatic. "In the neighing of an horse, or in the growling of a mastiff, there is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, may I say, more humanity than many times in the tragical flights of Shakespeare." His own notions of a tragical flight we may discover from his tragedy of "Edgar,” where in the first act Alfrida declares that she will, at Ethelwold's request, discard her ornaments, and the margin directs her to pull off her patches :— "Ethelw. Blaze on, dire comet-may thy influence be To crowns and empires fatal, as to me! Alfr. Whither do your rash words and passions fly? 'Tis that I you might with advantage please. If, wanting this, your love be not impair'd, These ornaments I readily discard. [Pulls off her patches." Four years after the scholiast upon his Grace of Buckingham had spoken the opinions which prevailed among Shakespeare endorsed by Pope. thousands of that day, who looked upon Shakespeare as at best a rude and uncultivated genius, no less a person than Mr. Pope himself became his editor. Whatever may have been his disqualification for his task, there was no man living whose name could do so much towards securing for the dramatist the allegiance of a larger circle of admirers. Yet Shakespeare's works, even when endorsed by the name of Pope, were thought to be a doubtful venture. Only seven hundred and fifty copies were printed, and of these it may not have been the editor's fault that part could not be sold until after a reduction of the price from six guineas to sixteen shillings. It is questionable whether Theobald could have won a public, or indeed a publisher for Shakespeare, had not Pope opened the way. His edition was the first with notes, but they were few, and turned chiefly upon verbal criticism. Pope consulted many of the old copies, professed "to have a religious horror of innovation," and declared that he had. not given vent to his own "private sense or conjecture." His alterations, nevertheless, were extensive, and his collation of the quartos and first folio imperfect. His text was full of the errors which had crept into the later folios; and having adopted the theory that many portions of the plays had been interpolated by the actors, and believing that he could distinguish the spurious passages from the genuine, he "degraded" the presumed additions "to the bottom of the page." His licence of conjecture was as largely exercised upon single lines and words, and his objections and emendations often show his ignorance of the manners and language of Shakespeare's times. But we gladly call to mind the finer touches of his pen. To him, for instance, we owe the reading of "Tarquin's ravishing strides," instead of sides, and it is still usual to praise him for the accepted version, which is, I think, a change for the worse-south for sound— of the lines Under French influence, the English mind. "O it came o'er my ears like the sweet sound Even Pope, then, so far failed to bring Shakespeare into immediate credit, that of the small number of copies of his edition there remained nearly a fifth part for Tonson to get rid of at less than a seventh of the published price. No defect in the editor that could have been appreciated by the public of his own day was accountable for this. The new spirit of French criticism was still ruling among us the taste of the polite; and Pope himself, our English poet of good sense, was as a viceroy for Boileau in England. Pope also had produced his metrical "Essay upon Criticism," and his mock heroic Lutrin in the "Rape of the Lock." But Pope's was English wit; and, if he saw how As critic he was an he at least was not born to serve. emulator, not an imitator; and he did not, like Boileau, contemplate Nature only in the mirror of the Greeks and Latins. His influence shattered the credit of "The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, A Dennis feebly, but for a time successfully, maintained the literal text of French laws of criticism against the literature of his country; although as a politician he did write on one of his title-pages "Liberty asserted against the French," and feared that peace could never be restored if he were not given up to the enemy. He appealed, indeed, in this difficulty, to Marlborough, who said he had no influence with the ministry, but thought his own case as desperate, as he had done almost as much injury to the French as Mr. Dennis himself. Dennis, inspired from such a Helicon as Pope imagined on his writing-table-"a pot of half-dead ale, covered with a Longinus,”—was an oracle no more when once he had been dragged out into the daylight. Yet even Dennis had his stronger side. Milton endorsed by Addison. But if it was Pope, the chief of the new taste among the poets, who in 1725 first sent the English polite world to Shakespeare, thirteen years earlier it had been Addison, chief arbiter of taste among prose-writers, the same who, in a metrical account of the greatest English poets, written, according to the mind of Oxford University, in 1694, had passed from Spenser to Cowley with no mention at all of Shakespeare,—it was Addison who had in 1712 brought Milton into fashion. Yet let us not forget that Steele had in "The Tatler" shown a heart and wit keenly alive to the genius both of Milton and of Shakespeare, before Addison had criticised the one, or Pope had edited the other. Upon the independent genius of Addison, as upon that of all great English writers, the stamp of the English character is set. He reverenced the ancients, he submitted much to the French critics, and was conspicuous among apostles of the gospel of good sense. He was so well in tune with his own time that, as Swift said in his Journal to Stella, "If he had a mind to be chosen king, he would hardly be refused;" but after all, it was the earnest English mind in him that had given breadth and depth to his influence. It was this that had caused him, one January morning towards the close of the year 1712, to introduce among "The Spectator" papers that day by day so gracefully and mildly brought to the touchstone of good sense the idler follies of society, Milton himself, heralded by the motto from Propertius, "Cedite Romani Scriptores; cedite Grau." During the next four months Milton was again and again his topic, "The Spectator" of eighteen successive Saturdays being occupied with the testimony of Addison to the majesty of "Paradise Lost." Latin In bearing witness to Milton, Addison no doubt still. paid undue homage to the French lawgivers who held their parliament upon Parnassus; but his homage was English. free from servility. "A few general rules extracted out of the French authors," he says in one of his Milton papers, "with a certain cant of words, has sometimes set up an illiterate, heavy writer for a most judicious and formidable critic." He demands of the good critic, not, indeed, that he shall look Nature straight in the face, but that he shall be skilled in the Greek and Latin authors; and adds, "There is not a Greek or Latin critic who has not shown, even in the style of his criticisms, that he was a master of all the elegance and delicacy of his native tongue." For Addison also followed, with almost all other writers of his day, the example of the French in testing the literary worth of modern languages, whether Romance or not, by their conformity with Latin style. Even Dryden, although he used a less Latinised English than that which became customary to the writers who immediately succeeded him, declared for Latin as the pattern of good English. In dedicating to the Earl of Sunderland his "Troilus and Cressida," he says, "How barbarously we yet write and speak, your Lordship knows, and I am sufficiently sensible in my own English. For I am often put to a stand in considering whether what I write be the idiom of the tongue, or false grammar and nonsense couched beneath that specious name of Anglicism; and have no other way to clear my doubts but by translating my English into Latin." This of the language that had sufficed for Shakespeare! It was not then understood that, if the English would do as the French had done, and bring their language into harmony with that from which it was derived, and with the greater number of the minds that spoke it, they must |