One tragic sentence if I dare deride
Which Betterton's grave action dignified . . .
How will our fathers rise up in a rage,
And swear, all shame is lost in George's age."[7]

The Shaksperian tradition is unbroken in the history of English
literature and of the English theater. His plays, in one form or
another, have always kept the stage even in the most degenerate condition
of public taste.[8] Few handsomer tributes have been paid to Shakspere's
genius than were paid in prose and verse, by the critics of our classical
age, from Dryden to Johnson. "To begin then with Shakspere," says the
former, in his "Essay of Dramatic Poesy," "he was the man who, of all
modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive
soul." And, in the prologue to his adaptation of "The Tempest," he
acknowledges that

"Shakspere's magic could not copied be:
Within that circle none durst walk but he."

"The poet of whose works I have undertaken the revision," writes Dr.
Johnson, "may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim
the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration."[9]

"Each change of many-colored life he drew,
Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new."[10]

Yet Dryden made many petulant, and Johnson many fatuous mistakes about
Shakspere; while such minor criticasters as Thomas Rymer[11] and Mrs.
Charlotte Lenox[12] uttered inanities of blasphemy about the finest
touches in "Macbeth" and "Othello." For if we look closer, we notice