so call it, would be required to give life to all the rest; which shines
through the roughest, most unpolished, and antiquated language, and may
haply be wanting in the most polite and reformed. Let us observe
Spenser, with all his rusty, obsolete words, with all his rough-hewn
clouterly verses; yet take him throughout, and we shall find in him a
graceful and poetic majesty. In like manner, Shakspere in spite of all
his unfiled expressions, his rambling and indigested fancies--the
laughter of the critical--yet must be confessed a poet above many that go
beyond him to literature[5] some degrees."

The laughter of the critical! Let us pause upon the phrase, for it is a
key to the whole attitude of the Augustan mind toward "our old tragick
poet." Shakspere was already a national possession. Indeed it is only
after the Restoration that we find any clear recognition of him, as one
of the greatest--as perhaps himself the very greatest--of the dramatists
of all time. For it is only after the Restoration that criticism begins.
"Dryden," says Dr. Johnson, "may be properly considered as the father of
English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine, upon
principles, the merit of composition. . . Dryden's 'Essay of Dramatic
Poesy' [1667] was the first regular and valuable treatise on the art of
writing."[6] The old theater was dead and Shakspere now emerged from
amid its ruins, as the one unquestioned legacy of the Elizabethan age to
the world's literature. He was not only the favorite of the people, but
in a critical time, and a time whole canons of dramatic art were opposed
to his practice, he united the suffrages of all the authoritative leader
of literacy opinion. Pope's lines are conclusive as to the veneration in
which Shakspere's memory was held a century after his death.

"On Avon's banks, where flowers eternal blow,
If I but ask, if any weed can grow;