I
INTRODUCTORY

This book provides a chronological sequence of the best pieces in verse and prose which the best writers in successive periods have written in praise of Shakespeare, and thereby aims at presenting, as it were, an index to the standard of estimation in which Shakespeare has been held at any given point of time. Thus, as an anthology, it differs in various respects from other anthologies. An anthology, as a rule, hopes to confine itself to pieces of literature intrinsically valuable. The conscientious compiler of an ordinary anthology includes nothing which, according to his own canons of taste, can be considered of doubtful merit. His choice may not always be approved by others—it frequently is not; but he, at least, is satisfied. Here, however, is a different case. My object has been to collect what may be called materials for a history of opinion of Shakespeare, so that as many years as might be of the three centuries and more, which have elapsed since Shakespeare’s reputation was born, had to be represented. With these conditions it has not always been possible to exclude bad pieces, for the obvious reason that there has been at times a dearth of good writers. In such cases the best has been given that could be found. The best has at times been deplorably mediocre, but the scheme was inexorable.

The labour of selection has been guided by one or two principles. In the first place, complete poems, or extracts in verse and prose, which relate solely to Shakespeare have been taken in preference to those which mention him in company with his contemporaries. Secondly, passages that exhibit unusual characteristics, whether good or bad, have frequently been chosen. For some of the poor pieces, and I hope they are not many, something may be said. Though their writers are practically forgotten to-day, they were considered great during their own lives; so their productions have at least a historical value. If, then, this volume includes, as I think it does, the best things that have been written about Shakespeare, it includes also many things that in a comparative estimate of the whole must be considered as second-rate, though they happened to be the best in the period during which they were produced. The distinctiveness of the book may perhaps be indicated in this way. An ordinary anthology may be said to gather into a garland the choicest flowers from various fields of literature; this anthology claims to be little more than a collection of botanical specimens.

II
DIVISION INTO PERIODS

The history of opinion of Shakespeare may be divided into three periods, represented broadly by the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Definite limits cannot be assigned to these three periods. Epochs of literary history must be determined ultimately, not by the work produced in them, or by the lives of the producers, but by the influences which gradually brought them into being. Thus, there must always be at the beginning and end of a period of literary history a kind of dovetailing with it of the periods before and after. Still, the three periods I have indicated are reasonably distinct. The first begins with the earliest mention of Shakespeare in print, and may be taken to end with the death of Dryden. The second period was largely affected by Dryden’s influence, and thus may be said to begin with the eighteenth century. And the last period, which is due to the reaction from the Augustan age of English literature, may be fairly dated from the beginning of the nineteenth century. The style of the literary products of these three centuries respectively goes to confirm the division. The first period is that of personal knowledge and oral tradition, and tributes to Shakespeare are for the most part in verse. It is the period during which his historical position was in the making. The second period is that of critics and emendators—the period when people begin to realise that there is some great power in Shakespeare’s work which finds no parallel in their own time, and must therefore be praised blindly, accounted for, or explained away. Tribute is clothed equally in verse and prose; it is, in short, the period of doubt and astonishment. The last period is that of Æsthetic criticism, and tribute is mostly in prose. Shakespeare’s position is an accepted fact.

Of the three periods, the second is by far the most interesting to the literary historian. Opinion of Shakespeare during the first period was to a large extent prejudiced by personal knowledge and tradition. The praise is practically equivalent to that of friends; which is to say, it is largely that of blind admiration. In the third period it is open-eyed, intelligent admiration. The matter has been sifted. The question of Shakespeare’s genius is no longer a debatable point. The praise is that of disciples who appreciate the logical basis of their master’s teaching, and who see the necessity of lucid explanation for the purpose of adding recruits to their number. But the second period is the time of trial. Shakespeare’s title to fame is weighed judicially, and is not found wanting.

III
THE FIRST PERIOD

Of the seventeenth century not much need be said, and, indeed, not much that is new can be said. The labours of the New Shakspere Society have added several valuable volumes to the literature relating to Shakespeare’s reputation during that period. Of these the Centurie of Prayse (of which the second and much enlarged edition was produced under the direction of Miss L. Toulmin Smith in 1879) brought together a very large number of allusions to Shakespeare both in print and manuscript, and these were supplemented by Some 300 Fresh Allusions, a work which was edited by Dr. Furnivall in 1886. These volumes display an amazing amount of diligent research, and few additions can be made to their contents. Seven hitherto unnoticed allusions to Shakespeare were discovered by Dr. Edward J. L. Scott in the Sloane Manuscripts at the British Museum, and communicated by him to the AthenÆum on 5th March 1898.[5:1] This evidence of Shakespeare’s reputation during the period under discussion has been ably supplemented by an article entitled Shakespeare in Oral Tradition, which Mr. Sidney Lee contributed to the Nineteenth Century in January 1902. This traces the actual recollection of Shakespeare by his friends and their descendants, from his personal acquaintance among the actors and the townsfolk of Stratford-on-Avon, to the reminiscences transmitted by word of mouth from Betterton to Nicholas Rowe, the poet’s first biographer. Mr. Lee’s paper is of the utmost importance. As he points out, “It was obviously the free circulation of the fame of Shakespeare’s work which stimulated the activity of interest in his private fortunes, and led to the chronicling of the oral tradition regarding them. It could easily be shown that outside the circle of professional poets, dramatists, actors, and fellow-townsmen, Shakespeare’s name was, from his first coming into public notice, constantly on the lips of scholars, statesmen, and men of fashion who had any glimmer of literary taste.”

The ground, therefore, may be said to be covered in so far as positive evidence of Shakespeare’s fame in the seventeenth century is concerned. But at least three popular fallacies have come into being, and it will be perhaps worth while to state them and definitely refute them. Their existence is due partly to lack of acquaintance with documentary evidence, and partly to misconception.

One of these popular fallacies is that Shakespeare practically vanished from the minds of his countrymen when he retired from the stage; and that what reputation he had in his lifetime was due to his prominence as an actor, rather than to his genius as a poet.

The preface of the First Folio (1623) is enough to prove that this was not the case. The tone of the address “to the great variety of readers” is not that of publishers trying to awaken interest in a forgotten personage, by calling attention to works that used to be popular. The language is that of affectionate friends, the references to Shakespeare those of intimate associates whose memories have not healed of the wound inflicted by his death. It was addressed to the public, not with the diffidence that is born of anxiety lest the subject of eulogy should meet with an indifferent welcome, but with the confidence that is inspired by friendship with a great man who is recognised as a great man.

The second impression of the Folio appeared in 1632, and the spirit of enthusiasm that breathes through the preliminary matter—the publisher’s preface and the various sets of verses—has become in no way weakened. The volume contains, indeed, two of the finest poems of direct personal eulogy that have ever been written—that signed I. M. S., and attributed by Coleridge somewhat fancifully to no less a person than John Milton, and the noble Epitaph on the admirable Dramatic Poet, W. Shakespeare, actually written by Milton in 1630. No sign of decayed reputation here. Nor elsewhere. King Charles I., it is well known, read Shakespeare. Copies of his plays and poems are mentioned in Prince Rupert’s library catalogue. His works were given on the stage, and formed topics of everyday discussion. One might multiply examples of his popularity, but it is striking at shadows.

Another popular error has tinged the traditional notion of Milton’s attitude to Shakespeare. It is supposed that his opinion of Shakespeare underwent a complete change from that exhibited in the lines mentioned above. The error that attributes to Milton this surprising revulsion of feeling is due to a misconception of a certain passage in his Eikonoklastes. Milton wrote thus:

The blundering interpretation of this passage, which Warton accepted and transmitted to his successors, including De Quincey, is that Charles I. was reproved by Milton for having made Shakespeare his closet companion. “The Prince of Wales (afterwards Charles I.),” says De Quincey in his Life of Shakespeare, “had learned to appreciate Shakespeare, not originally from reading him, but from witnessing the Court representations of his plays at Whitehall. Afterwards we know that he made Shakespeare his closet companion, for he was reproached with doing so by Milton.” A careful perusal of the passage will show that nothing was farther from Milton’s intention. Such a deduction is logically impossible. Three things, however, undoubtedly may be deduced from it; and they not only bear a significance directly opposed to the erroneous interpretation, but they are of the highest importance as positive evidence of Milton’s appreciation of Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare’s literary fame. One may deduce, firstly, that Shakespeare was known, at any rate by name, to the Puritans, who chiefly composed the public for which Milton was writing. Secondly (since Charles was not, we may believe, the man to read in private books that he did not like), that the king’s knowledge of Shakespeare was intimate and his appreciation sincere. And, thirdly, that Shakespeare was, in Milton’s opinion, one who depicts human nature with accuracy. For, consider the force of the parallel. Milton wrote to show that the deeds of monarchs are not always the substantiation of their words. The Byzantine tyrant, with his mouth full of piety, is cited as one instance; Shakespeare’s Richard III. as being, by familiarity, likely to bring the matter home to Charles, is cited as another. Which is, in effect, that Shakespeare’s portrayal of a king of such character is, in Milton’s opinion, proof that such a king may exist. There is nothing slighting about that. It is high praise.

Milton wrote his Eikonoklastes in 1649, when he was forty-one. In 1645 he had written his L’Allegro, with the lines:

The lines attributed to him in the Second Folio had appeared in 1632, and his fully authenticated Epitaph in 1630. Further, his influence has been traced in the notice of Shakespeare which appeared in the Theatrum Poetarum, published in 1675 by Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew. Here, surely, is sufficient evidence that throughout his life Milton’s early enthusiasm for Shakespeare did not diminish.

A third popular fallacy is that which maintains Shakespeare’s reputation to have been at its lowest ebb after the Restoration. This belief is well expressed in Victor Hugo’s Shakespeare.

Now the numerous adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays which appeared after the Restoration have been taken somewhat paradoxically as indicative of his decline in the public estimation. Such a deduction is by no means accurate. If we take into consideration the comparatively low level to which imaginative literature had fallen under the influence of Charles II.’s Court, the wonder is perhaps that the theatre-going public should have received Shakespeare in any form. Such neglect of Shakespeare as is seen at this time is attributable merely to change of fashion in popular literature, and that was then, and still is, as mutable as the sea. Popular literature does not live, and the adaptations of the later Stuart reigns are now known only to curious students. But Shakespeare lived through it all, known and appreciated by all who had souls above the vulgar; and in this very period he passed triumphantly his first examination at the hands of a skilled critic, John Dryden. Dryden was in every respect typical of the cultivated class of his period. His early judgment of Shakespeare was formed in the somewhat flickering light of Restoration taste. His final estimate was that of a matured thinker. Certainly, adaptations prepared to suit the fickle taste of the playgoer of the period cannot be said to reflect the true character of Shakespeare’s reputation. We see the same thing at the present day. The altruism of theatrical managers is compelled to make concessions to popular demands. The public are still rather shy of going to see Shakespeare simply as Shakespeare. They appear to feel that going to see a play of Shakespeare is like sacrificing themselves for their own good. So the managers who gild the pill for them are successful, and those who do not merely fail, or at best earn a precarious livelihood. One might as well say that Shakespeare’s reputation is at a very low ebb to-day, as make the deduction from the fact of the Restoration adaptations. The playgoers of that period wanted something piquant. One may suppose—to put the matter in modern terms—that Heine and De Maupassant collaborating might have produced a popular success. Wycherley and Congreve met the demand as nearly as possible. But Shakespeare was not the thing.

IV
THE SECOND PERIOD

I have taken 1700, the date of Dryden’s death, as that which most fittingly marks the close of the first period and the beginning of the second, for it is very soon after that year that the spirit of the eighteenth century begins to make itself manifest. In the history of literature the eighteenth century stands out distinct as a whole. The literature of the seventeenth century had many characteristics, which, even in the most cursory survey, require attention, and these characteristics were mainly due to the connection of literature with the Court. The pedantic James I. was a patron of learning. His son Charles I., and grandson Charles II., inherited the taste for polite letters, and encouraged or influenced indirectly the authors of their times. But the eighteenth century monarchs were different. They did not concern themselves much with men of letters, and literature went its course comparatively unaffected by fashion. But it was affected by the spirit of the age—the spirit born of gradual recognition of the Renaissance. As David Lloyd in his State Worthies said of the early seventeenth century, “it was the very guise at that time to be learned; the wits of it were so excellent, the helps and assistants of it were so great; printing was so common; the world (by navigation) so open; great experiments so disclosed; the leisure of men so much, the age so peaceable; and His Majesty, after whom all writ, so knowing.” At that time learning was a novelty, and consequently it was fashionable—it was “the very guise.” By the eighteenth century great men had grown accustomed to it; and it was becoming the property of the lesser worthies, who, unable to resist the temptation to “show off,” turned out reams of didactic verse, the substance of which would nowadays hide its light beneath the respectable bushel of the journal of some scientific society. Dryden was perhaps mainly responsible. He had pronounced the dictum: “They cannot be good poets who are not accustomed to argue well.” At any rate, with the eighteenth century the poetry of argument or logic, as distinct from that of inspiration, came into being, and by far the greater part of the poetry of the hundred years that followed Dryden’s death was that of poets who are made rather than poets who are born. The same feeling informs the prose. It is true that the age produced Horace Walpole. But Walpole was a literary trifler, and liked to be thought so, though he was amazingly industrious. The eighteenth century saw much excellent prose, but it is almost always the prose of “will” or “must” rather than that of “can.” It comes rather of fertility of reason than of fertility of fancy. Of such stock are commentators born.

One finds, accordingly, that the principal producers of pure literature, whether prose or verse, were also critics, and most of them turned their attention, sooner or later, to Shakespeare. Prominent figures in the history of Shakespearean criticism in the eighteenth century stand Pope and Johnson. Both are classical scholars in an age of pedants; both are among the foremost advocates of rigid adherence to prescribed rules in literary production; both place imagination below intellect in estimation of genius; and both are honoured by their fellows as arbiters and dictators of literary taste. Each of them is inclined to say unkind things about Shakespeare, and hardly dares. Pope is the more generous of the two. “It will be,” he says, “but fair to allow that most of our author’s faults are less to be ascribed to his wrong judgment as a poet, than to his right judgment as a player.” Which is to say, that Shakespeare, poor soul! must needs trim his boat to suit the current of popular opinion; that the greater part of his audience in the theatres consisted of low fellows who had never heard of Aristotle, and must not be troubled with the unities and such matters, which they could not understand. One has but to continue this line of argument to conclude that Pope thought Shakespeare so much a part and product of the age in which he was born, that had he been born, say, in Pope’s age, he might (which Heaven forbid!) have been a perfect poet according to Pope’s lights—might, in fact, have translated Homer, to supply the sixpenny boxes of second-hand booksellers two centuries later. But Pope certainly thought Shakespeare very great. His greatness was, perhaps, not of quite the right kind in Pope’s estimation; but greatness he undoubtedly thought it. As to Shakespeare’s want of learning, Pope frankly refused to believe in it. He says very wisely:

Pope further attributed many of Shakespeare’s errors to the carelessness or ignorance of the first publishers of his works, suggesting that the original copies from which they were printed were no better than the “prompter’s book, or piecemeal parts written out for the use of the actors,” who may be supposed to have made numerous small excisions and additions.

Thus Pope says in effect that Shakespeare would have been perfect if the age and conditions in which he lived had allowed him. He sees many beauties in him, but he also sees many defects; and his edition of Shakespeare’s works is remarkable chiefly for its omissions of passages which the editor deems unworthy of his author.

Dr. Johnson is by no means so ready metaphorically to grasp Shakespeare by the hand. He follows a procession of editors of more or less ability, and he feels that the time has come for the final settlement of Shakespeare’s true position. Rowe, the first editor, hardly realised his responsibilities, and his edition of the plays which appeared in 1709 has few merits from the critic’s point of view. Pope, who followed him in 1725, had a reputation for brilliance to sustain, and his preface is remarkable rather for neatness of expression than for critical discernment. Theobald came after Pope, in 1733, with much common sense, which made him the laughing-stock of his successors. The next editor, Sir Thomas Hanmer, intended his edition as a tribute to Shakespeare, and what was lacking in criticism was supplied in good paper and printing. Warburton succeeded with a pompous self-assertiveness that expressed itself in amusing but ineffective paradoxes.

Johnson accordingly had a due sense of what was expected of him. His critical equipment consisted in a knowledge of the classical drama, and his Æsthetic judgment was founded on the rules by which he had succeeded in his own poetical ventures. Still, he did his best to assume a strictly unbiassed judicial attitude. He did not, as Macaulay states, take it for granted that “the kind of poetry which flourished in his own time, which he had been accustomed to hear praised from his childhood, and which he had himself written with success, was the best kind of poetry.” He tried deliberately to approach Shakespeare as he approached the Cock Lane Ghost. He dealt with him as with some mysterious phenomenon which was attracting public attention, and which admitted of explanation. The result was, perhaps, the best balanced common-sense judgment on record. It contained, on the one hand, the most tremendous indictment of Shakespeare that is ever likely to be written; and, on the other, a triumphant defence, coupled with much enthusiastic eulogy. Here are some of the “faults which,” as he puts it, “are sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit”:

Johnson proceeds to defend Shakespeare by an excellent demonstration of the absurdity of the unities, and at the close of it owns himself “almost frighted at his own temerity.” Then he follows Pope in finding Shakespeare to be hampered by the age in which he lived. “The English nation, in the time of Shakespeare, was yet struggling to emerge from barbarity.” Having to appeal to immature intellects, he was compelled to base his plays on novels and traditions well known to his audience, “for his audience could not have followed him through the intricacies of the drama had they not held the thread of the story in their hands.” In reply to Voltaire, who expressed wonder that Shakespeare’s extravagances should be endured by a nation which had seen the tragedy of Cato, Johnson says that “Addison speaks the language of poets, and Shakespeare of men.” He proceeds to deal with Shakespeare’s learning, and Shakespeare emerges from the ordeal credited with rather less than the average board-school boy of the present day. Johnson decides at length that “if much of his praise is paid by perception and judgment, much is likewise given by custom and veneration”; and, finally, he sums up his merits in the following fine sentence:—

It is difficult in the face of these pros and cons to determine what Johnson’s attitude towards Shakespeare really was. Much of his apparent hostility may, perhaps, be attributed to his instinctive argumentativeness. It was his nature to object. If he were in a loquacious mood, you had but to make a bald statement, and he was upon you with an aggressively persuasive “Why, sir!” And here it may be that he felt irresistibly impelled to combat the universal opinion of Shakespeare’s greatness, and that he was hardly sincere in all he wrote. However this may be, it is probable that he left on his readers the impression that the balance of his inclination was against rather than for Shakespeare. The very fact of the judicial attitude would tend to produce such an impression. A judicial attitude towards Shakespeare was not at that period so well understood as to be readily distinguished from unfriendliness. And in estimating the critical attitude of the age towards Shakespeare, it is necessary to bear in mind that Dr. Johnson was a more important person when he lived than he is now. Nothing is gained by speculating what he might have thought. The fact remains that what he wrote carried weight.

Johnson’s opinion was not, however, sufficiently weighty to make his preface, as he intended it to be, the last word in Shakespearean criticism. Other editors followed him. Edward Capell brought much serious and laborious scholarship to the task; and his judgments were frequently sound, though his lack of perspicuity in delivering them detracts somewhat from their value. His edition appeared in 1768. Five years later, in 1773, George Steevens revised Johnson’s edition, and, bringing to the enterprise an unrivalled knowledge of Elizabethan history and literature, embodied many improvements, which he treated with a humour that was frequently malicious and occasionally obscene. To the second edition (1778) of this work was added much valuable material relating to Shakespeare’s biography and the sources of his plots, due to the researches of Edmund Malone, who published an edition of his own in 1790. The well-known “First Variorum” edition appeared in twenty-one volumes in 1803, prepared by Isaac Reed from a 1793 copy of Steevens’, containing many manuscript notes. The “Second Variorum” appeared in 1813; and the “Third Variorum,” arranged by James Boswell, the son of Johnson’s biographer, which appeared in 1821, marks the close of what may be called the eighteenth century period of commentators.

It will be seen, then, that Shakespeare was at this time kept prominently before the eyes of the reading public. He was equally a topic of interest with men of letters who confined themselves to no special branch of literature. The attitude of the eighteenth century essayists toward Shakespeare was essentially one of admiration and respect for his genius. They found fault with his plays, it is true, frequently enough, but almost always apologetically. He was not infrequently held up as a model for modern dramatists to follow. The Connoisseur, for example, printed a paper discussing the sources of the Merchant of Venice; and while elaborating the fact that the plot was borrowed, insisted on the genius displayed in the use which Shakespeare made of it. The Guardian, again, enlarges on the naturalness of Shakespeare’s characters—remarkable at a time when poetry was, above all things, rhetorical and artificial.

Let us glance now at the poetical critics. It will be noticed that many of the pieces printed in the body of this book appear under names that are not very familiar, and that the eighteenth century is responsible for the majority of them. In modern anthologies it is not usual to include selections from the works of such poets; nor, indeed, if literary excellence be the compiler’s object, is it expedient. They are included here not because their effusions appear to me to reach even a modest standard of merit, but because they were accepted as good poets by their contemporaries and by the literary dictator, Dr. Johnson. Johnson, it is true, disclaimed responsibility for the choice of names represented in his edition of British poets, but the repudiation cannot be considered of much importance. Johnson’s name had probably more weight with publishers than that of any other man of his time, and it is hardly likely that his advice in the matter of inclusion or rejection, had he thought it worth while to give it, would have been ignored. So one may feel certain that every name on his list appeared with his approval. The laudatory criticisms embodied in the biographies, which he asserted marked the extent of his commission, prove as much. Take Blackmore, for example, whose Creation was included, on Johnson’s recommendation, in his edition of the poets. “This poem,” he says, “if he had written nothing else, would have transmitted him to posterity among the first favourites of the English Muse.” Posterity, on the whole, has not given the Muse’s favourite much of a welcome, and Blackmore is one of a number of such chosen ones. But even Johnson might have known better. They had their reputations ready made for them by patrons. It was the age of patrons and extravagant compliment, and Shakespeare in the hands of these small poets took a place similar to that of the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome. Poetical flatterers of great men permitted him to fill the position of comparative in the scale of eulogy, the object of their praises being the superlative. Just as the writers of light society compliments made envious Venus second to Clorinda or Chloe or Celia, so Shakespeare stood aside to find himself excelled by Addison or Pope or Dryden, or even, on exceptional occasions, by some patron who scarcely did more than pretend to throw off little trifles in verse. Witness the “Lines to Mr. Addison,” by William Somervile:

Or take these lines by John Hughes, “To Mr. Addison on his Tragedy of Cato”:

If one could suppose this to have been written in an ironic vein, the lines would be satisfactorily pointed; but it is impossible, for Hughes continues:

Or take the following by William Pattison, “To Mr. John Saunders, occasioned by a sight of some of his paintings at Cambridge.” It would be difficult to imagine a more incongruous bracketing of names than that in the sixth line. The italics are my own:

One might quote pages of such stuff—torrents of heroic couplets—whose very form, apart from their sentiment, show that Shakespeare was deemed rather out of date. But the mention of his name counts for something. It means that all of these poets felt, as Dr. Johnson felt, that though they were not quite in sympathy with the old Elizabethan playwright, he was still some one to be reckoned with. Indeed, every now and then the truth comes out that he was too much for them. William Whitehead, for one, had a full appreciation of him.

he sighs in An Hymn to the Nymph of Bristol; and, for all the bathos of its expression, the admiration is genuine.

William Hamilton wrote A Soliloquy in Imitation of Hamlet, a paraphrase of the famous speech, almost as bald as that from which Shakespeare copied his. But the effort is doubtless more of a literary exercise than an attempt at improvement of the original, for Hamilton shows at various points in his works a fairly intimate knowledge and real regard for Shakespeare’s genius.

Mallet read his Shakespeare intelligently, as witness his Edwin and Emma, a love ballad, with its text taken from Twelfth Night. And William Shenstone shows the right spirit in this very passable stanza from The Schoolmistress, happily describing a village school:

That is well meaning and temperate enough, but some of these writers erred on the side of enthusiasm. The following passage from Robert Lloyd’s Shakespeare, an Epistle to Mr. Garrick, may be quoted as an example:

It will be noted that this effusion approaches Shakespeare through Garrick; and such is the case with many others that must remain unquoted. The reason is that Garrick occupied, by public consent if not by his own desire, the position of Shakespeare’s patron. He took, for instance, a leading part in organising the Shakespeare jubilee at Stratford-on-Avon. Among his enterprises on this occasion was the issue of a volume of tributes to Shakespeare, containing several poetical pieces by himself, distinguished rather for their enthusiasm than for poetical inspiration. Dr. Johnson opened the book with some light verses, addressed to The Fair in a vein of somewhat elephantine playfulness; and Garrick collected into it a number of extracts from various writers, in verse and prose, in praise of Shakespeare, prefacing the whole with a high-flown effort of his own in heroic couplets, and publishing it in handsome quarto.

In the garden of his house at Hampton, Garrick had a temple dedicated to Shakespeare, and adorned with statuary, of which the chief piece, a fine full-length figure by Roubiliac, is now in the entrance hall of the British Museum. But to do him justice, his efforts, though they carried the manner of the playhouse into private life, were conceived in a spirit of genuine appreciation; and if many of his admirers regarded him almost as the rescuer of Shakespeare from oblivion, he, at any rate, was ready to acknowledge his indebtedness to the dramatist on the presentation of whose characters his well-merited fame rested.

So much for the second period.[26:1] Its literature is like a troubled sea of conflicting opinion, through which the ship of Shakespeare’s genius sails, tossed and buffeted by winds fair and foul, from all points of the compass, and emerges triumphant.

V
THE THIRD PERIOD

In the foregoing brief survey I have endeavoured to indicate in the broadest manner possible the principal forces that affected the opinions concerning Shakespeare held during the eighteenth century—the chief boulders, so to say, round which the current of opinion swirled. No such analysis seems necessary in dealing with the nineteenth century. That is, comparatively speaking, smooth water. The poetic reformation inaugurated by Wordsworth and Coleridge, who published their Lyrical Ballads in 1798, practically effaced the classic traditions of the previous hundred years, and prepared a way for the school of Æsthetic criticism which set Shakespeare in the place which he now holds.

Æsthetic criticism, of a kind, was not entirely unknown. So far back, for instance, as 1736, an anonymous pamphlet appeared with the title, Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The author is an enthusiastic admirer of “the greatest tragic writer that ever lived (except Sophocles and Euripides),” though most of the beauties which he points out would be obvious to a reader of average intelligence, and his expositions lack insight. Such efforts were, in fact, nothing more than academic recreation, and but for their evidence of a right tendency are hardly worthy of mention. In effect they were, of course, immeasurably distant from the work of the Æsthetic critics of the early nineteenth century. Coleridge spoke truly when he thus described his achievement:

“However inferior in ability I may be to some who have followed me, I own I am proud that I was the first in time who publicly demonstrated to the full extent of the position, that the supposed irregularity and extravagances of Shakespeare were the mere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it had not the dimensions of the swan.”[28:1]