----All the _Int’rim_ is
Like a Phantasma, or a hideous Dream.
----the State of Man,
Like to a little Kingdom, suffers then
The Nature of an Insurrection.

Comparing the Mind of a Conspirator to an Anarchy, is just and
beautiful; but the _Interim_ to a _hideous Dream_ has something in
it so wonderfully natural, and lays the human Soul so open, that one
cannot but be surpriz’d, that any Poet, who had not himself been,
some time or other, engaged in a Conspiracy, could ever have given
such Force of Colouring to Truth and Nature.

[Sidenote: The Question on _Shakespeare_’s Learning handled.]

It has been allow’d on all hands, far our Author was indebted to
_Nature_; it is not so well agreed, how much he ow’d to _Languages_
and acquir’d _Learning_. The Decisions on this Subject were
certainly set on Foot by the Hint from _Ben Jonson_, that he had
small _Latin_ and less _Greek_: And from this Tradition, as it were,
Mr. _Rowe_ has thought fit peremptorily to declare, that, “It is
without Controversy, he had no Knowledge of the Writings of the
ancient Poets, for that in his Works we find no Traces of any thing
which looks like an Imitation of the Ancients. For the Delicacy of
his Taste (_continues He_,) and the natural Bent of his own great
Genius (equal, if not superior, to some of the Best of theirs;)
would certainly have led him to read and study them with so much
Pleasure, that some of their fine Images would naturally have
insinuated themselves into, and been mix’d with, his own Writings:
so that his not copying, at least, something from them, may be an