that everyone who bore witness to Shakspere's greatness qualified his
praise by an emphatic disapproval of his methods. He was a prodigious
genius, but a most defective artist. He was the supremest of dramatic
poets, but he did not know his business. It did not apparently occur to
anyone--except, in some degree, to Johnson--that there was an absurdity
in this contradiction; and that the real fault was not in Shakspere, but
in the standards by which he was tried. Here are the tests which
technical criticism has always been seeking to impose, and they are not
confined to the classical period only. They are used by Sidney, who took
the measure of the English buskin before Shakspere had begun to write; by
Jonson, who measured socks with him in his own day; by Matthew Arnold,
who wanted an English Academy, but in whom the academic vaccine, after so
long a transmission, worked but mildly. Shakspere violated the unities;
his plays were neither right comedies nor right tragedies; he had small
Latin and less Greek; he wanted art and sometimes sense, committing
anachronisms and Bohemian shipwrecks; wrote hastily, did not blot enough,
and failed of the grand style. He was "untaught, unpractised in a
barbarous age"; a wild, irregular child of nature, ignorant of the rules,
unacquainted with ancient models, succeeding--when he did succeed--by
happy accident and the sheer force of genius; his plays were
"roughdrawn," his plots lame, his speeches bombastic; he was guilty on
every page of "some solecism or some notorious flaw in sense."[13]

Langbaine, to be sure, defends him against Dryden's censure. But Dennis
regrets his ignorance of poetic art and the disadvantages under which he
lay from not being conversant with the ancients. If he had known his
Sallust, he would have drawn a juster picture of Caesar; and if he had
read Horace "Ad Pisones," he would have made a better Achilles. He
complains that he makes the good and the bad perish promiscuously; and
that in "Coriolanus"--a play which Dennis "improved" for the new