re his own words; but his wisdom has, in this particular, been his
worst enemy: while its opposite, whether in the shape of folly or
madness, has been _their_ best friend. But he was a great power, and
bears a high name: the laurel has been awarded to him.

A dramatic Author, if he write for the stage, must adapt himself to
the taste of the audience, or they will not endure him; accordingly
the mighty genius of Shakespeare was listened to. The people were
delighted: but I am not sufficiently versed in stage antiquities to
determine whether they did not flock as eagerly to the representation
of many pieces of contemporary Authors, wholly undeserving to appear
upon the same boards. Had there been a formal contest for superiority
among dramatic writers, that Shakespeare, like his predecessors
Sophocles and Euripides, would have often been subject to the
mortification of seeing the prize adjudged to sorry competitors,
becomes too probable, when we reflect that the admirers of Settle
and Shadwell were, in a later age, as numerous, and reckoned as
respectable, in point of talent, as those of Dryden. At all events,
that Shakespeare stooped to accommodate himself to the People, is
sufficiently apparent; and one of the most striking proofs of his
almost omnipotent genius is, that he could turn to such glorious
purpose those materials which the prepossessions of the age compelled
him to make use of. Yet even this marvellous skill appears not to have
been enough to prevent his rivals from having some advantage over him
in public estimation; else how can we account for passages and scenes
that exist in his works, unless upon a supposition that some of the
grossest of them, a fact which in my own mind I have no doubt of, were
foisted in by the Players, for the gratification of the many?

But that his Works, whatever might be their reception upon the stage,
made but little impression upon the ruling Intellects of the time,
may be inferred from the fact that Lord Bacon, in his multifarious
writings, nowhere either quotes or alludes to him.[5] His dramatic
excellence enabled him to resume possession of the stage after the
Restoration; but Dryden tells us that in his time two of the plays
of Beaumont and Fletcher were acted for one of Shakespeare's. And so
faint and limited was the perception of the poetic beauties of his
dramas in the time of Pope, that, in his Edition of the Plays, with
a view of rendering to the general reader a nec