as
to remain settled and unaltered; this style is probably to be sought
in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to
be understood, without ambition of elegance. The polite are always
catching modish innovations, and the learned depart from established
forms of speech, in hope of finding or making better; those who wish
for distinction forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar is right; but
there is a conversation above grossness and below refinement, where
propriety resides, and where this poet seems to have gathered his
comick dialogue. He is therefore more agreeable to the ears of the
present age than any other authour equally remote, and among his other
excellencies deserves to be studied as one of the original masters of
our language.

These observations are to be considered not as unexceptionally
constant, but as containing general and predominant truth.
_Shakespeare's_ familiar dialogue is affirmed to be smooth and clear,
yet not wholly without ruggedness or difficulty; as a country may be
eminently fruitful, though it has spots unfit for cultivation:
His characters are praised as natural, though their sentiments are
sometimes forced, and their actions improbable; as the earth upon the
whole is spherical, though its surface is varied with protuberances
and cavities.

_Shakespeare_ with his excellencies has likewise faults, and faults
sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit. I shall shew
them in the proportion in which they appear to me, without envious
malignity or superstitious veneration. No question can be more
innocently discussed than a dead poet's pretensions to renown; and
little regard is due to that bigotry which sets candour higher than
truth.

His first defect is that to which may be imputed most of the evil in
books or in men. He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so
much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write
without any moral purpose. From his writings indeed a system of
social duty may be selected, for he that thinks reasonably must think
morally; but his precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes
no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to shew
in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons
indifferently through right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them
without further care, and leaves their examples to operate by chance.
This fault the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate; fo