The reader, who comes to it through this Introduction, will note two
points to qualify his appreciation of the book as a specimen of
Hazlitt's critical writing, and a third that helps to account for
its fortune in 1817. It was the work of a man in his thirty-eighth
year, and to that extent has maturity. But it was also his first
serious essay, after many false starts, in an art and in a style
which, later on, he brilliantly mastered. The subject is most
pleasantly handled, and with an infectious enthusiasm: the reader
feels all the while that his sympathy with Shakespeare is being
stimulated and his understanding promoted: but it scarcely yields
either the light or the music which Hazlitt communicates in his
later and more famous essays.

For the third point, Hazlitt had made enemies nor had ever been
cautious of making them: and these enemies were now the 'upper dog'.
Indeed, they always had been: but the fall of Napoleon, which almost
broke his heart, had set them in full cry, and they were not clement
in their triumph. It is not easy, even on the evidence before us, to
realize that a number of the finest spirits in this country, nursed
in the hopes of the French Revolution, kept their admiration of
Napoleon, the hammer of old bad monarchies, down to the end and
beyond it: that Napier, for example, historian of the war in the
Peninsula and as gallant a soldier as ever fought under Wellington,
when--late in life, as he lay on his sofa tortured by an old wound--
news was brought him of Napoleon's death, burst into a storm of
weeping that would not be controlled. On Hazlitt, bound up heart and
soul in what he regarded as the cause of French and European liberty
and enlightenment, Waterloo, the fall of the Emperor, the
restoration of the Bourbons, fell as blows almost stupefying, and
his indignant temper charged Heaven with them as wrongs not only