co-operated with chance; all perhaps are more willing to honour past than prefent excellence; and the mind contemplates genius through the shades of age, as the eye furveys the fun through artificial opacity. The great contention of criticism is to find the faults of the moderns, and the beauties of the ancients. While an authour is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best. ' To works, however, of which the excellence is not abfolute and definite, but gradual and comparative; to works not raised upon principles demonstrative and scientifick, but appealing wholly to obfervation and experience, no other teft can be applied than length of duration and continuance of efteem. What mankind have long poffeffed they have often examined and compared, and if they perfift to value the poffeffion, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour. As among the works of nature no man can properly call a river deep or a mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains and many rivers; fo in the productions of genius, nothing can be ftiled excellent, till it has been compared with other works of the fame kind. Demonftration immediately difplays its power, and has nothing to hope or fear from the flux of years; but works tentative and experimental must be estimated by their proportion to the general and collective ability of man, as it is discovered in a long fucceffion of endeavours. Of the first building that was raised, it might be with certainty determined that it was round or square, but whether it was fpacious or lofty must have been referred to time. The Pythagorean scale of numbers was at once discovered to be perfect; but the poems of Homer we yet know not to transcend the common limits of human intelligence, but by remarking, that nation after nation, and century after century, has been able to do little more than transpose his incidents, new name his characters, and paraphrafe his fentiments. The reverence due to writings that have long fubfifted arifes therefore not from any credulous confidence in the fuperior wisdom of paft ages, or gloomy perfuafion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the confequence of acknowledged and indubitable pofitions, that what has been longest known has been moft confidered, and what is most confidered is best understood. The Poet, of whofe works I have undertaken the revision, may now begin to affume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration. He has long outlived his century, the term commonly fixed as the teft of literary merit. Whatever advantages he might once derive from perfonal allufions, local cuftoms, or temporary opinions, have for many years been loft; and every topick of merriment or motive of forrow, which the modes of artificial life afforded him, now only obfcure the scenes which they once illuminated. The effects of favour and competition are at an end; the tradition of his friendships and his enmities has perifhed; his works fupport no opinion with arguments, nor fupply any faction with invectives; they can neither indulge vanity, nor gratify malignity, but are read without any other reason than the defire of pleasure, and are therefore praised only as pleasure is obtained; yet, thus unaffifted by intereft or paffion, they have past through variations of taste and changes of manners, and, as they devolved from one generation to another, have received new honours at every transmission. But because human judgment, though it be gradually gaining upon certainty, never becomes infallible; and approbation, though long continued, may yet be only the approbation of prejudice or fashion; it is proper to inquire, by what peculiarities of excellence Shakespeare has gained and kept the favour of his countrymen. A 2 Nothing Nothing can please many, and please long, but just reprefentations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common fatiety of life fends us all in queft; but the pleasures of fudden wonder are foon exhaufted, and the mind can only repofe on the ftability of truth. Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or profeffions, which can operate but upon fmall numbers; or by the accidents of tranfient fafhions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, fuch as the world will always fupply, and obfervation will always find. His perfons act and speak by the influence of thofe general paffions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole fyftem of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in thofe of Shakespeare it is commonly a fpecies. It is from this wide extenfion of defign that fo much inftruction is derived. It is this which fills the plays of Shakespeare with practical axioms and domestick wifdom. It was faid of Euripides, that、 every verfe was a precept; and it may be faid of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a fyftem of civil and economical prudence. Yet his real power is not fhown in the splendour of particular paffages, but by the progrefs of his fable, and, the tenour of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by felect quotations, will fucceed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his houfe to fale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen. It will not easily be imagined how much Shakespeare excells in accommodating his fentiments to real life, but by comparing him with other authors. It was obferved of the ancient schools of declamation, that the more diligently they were frequented, the more was the ftudent difqualified for the world, because he found nothing there which he should ever meet in any other place. The fame remark may be applied to every ftage but that of Shakespeare. The theatre, when it is under any other direction, is peopled by fuch characters as were never seen, converfing in a language which was never heard, upon topicks which will never arife in the commerce of mankind. But the dialogue of this authour is often fo evidently determined by the incident which produces it, and is purfued with fo much eafe and fimplicity, that it feems fcarcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent felection out of common converfation, and common occurrences. in Upon every other ftage the univerfal agent is love, s by whofe power all good and evil is diftributed, and every action quickened or retarded. To bring a lover, a lady and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppofitions of intereft, and harrafs them with violence of defires inconfiftent with each other; to make them meet rapture and part in agony; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous forrow; to diftrefs them as nothing human ever was diftreffed; to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered, is the bufinefs of a modern dramatist. For this probability is violated, life is mifreprefented, and language is depraved. But love is only one of many paffions, and as it has no great influence the fum of life, it has little opera upon tion in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he faw before him. He knew, that other paffion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a caufe of happinefs or calamity. any A 3 Characters Characters thus ample and general were not easily difcriminated and preserved, yet perhaps no poet ever kept his perfonages more diftinct from each other. I will not fay with Pope, that every speech may be affigned to the proper fpeaker, becaufe many fpeeches there are which have nothing characteristical; but, perhaps, though fome may be equally adapted to every perfon, it will be difficult to find, any that can be properly transferred from the prefent poffeffor to another claimant. The choice is right, when there is reafon for choice. Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and dwarf; and he that fhould form his expectations of human affairs from the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakespeare has no heroes; his cenes are occupied only by men, who act and fpeak as the reader thinks that he fhould himfelf have fpoken or acted on the fame occafion: Even where the agency is fupernatural the dialogue is level with life. Other writers difguite the moft natural paffions and moft frequent incidents; fo that he who contemplates them in the book will not know them in the world: Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he reprefents will not happen, but if it were poffible, its effects would be probably fuch as` he has affigned; and it may be said, that he has not only fhewn human nature as it acts in real exigences, but as it would be found in trials, to which it cannot be expofed. This therefore is the praife of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirrour of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious extafies, by reading human fentiments in human language; by fcenes from which a hermit may efti mate |