ay in critical writing, the way of particular as opposed to general
criticism, with the selection of specific details for praise and
explication; in his essay on the Imagination he had sought to find a
rationale for that kind of criticism: in which a man of true taste,
going beyond the mechanical rules, "would enter into the very Spirit and
Soul of Fine Writing, and shew us the several Sources of that Pleasure
which rises in the Mind upon the Perusal of a Noble Work." With such
ideas in mind, Anonymous proceeds to study _Hamlet_, in what is probably
the first act-by-act, scene-by-scene analysis of a play in English,
according to his understanding of the principles of the "new criticism"
as he finds them illustrated in Addison's theory and practice.

Having brushed aside the "fantastick Rules" of the conventional critics,
he proceeds to apply his laws of "Reason and Nature" as criteria by
which to test the validity of Shakespeare's effects and to discover the
cause of these effects. The results he achieves are in part conditioned
by his interpretation of his basic terms. Reason and Nature had been
invoked by many previous critics; but to Anonymous these words are not
what they were to Boileau and Pope. They particularly have nothing, or
next to nothing, to do with the Deistic concept of a universal nature of
external diversity but of an internal rational and universal order,
which art reveals and to which art at its best conforms. To Anonymous,
who in this is following the lead of the Hobbian school, the nature that
is the norm by which Shakespeare is to be judged is merely human nature,
used as Whately, Richardson, and Morgann are to use it later, and as
Johnson uses it when he argues that there is an appeal open from custom
to nature. Anonymous' interest is in the way the mind works and the way
people customarily act. So also when he talks about reason, he is
thinking only of what is acceptable to a logical, healthy mind. He has
no thought of identifying nature or reason with the traditional Rules or
with Homer. On the contrary, he is willing to set both of them quite
apart from, or even in opposition to the Rules (with a qualifying
concession that they may sometimes meet), and he definitely renounces
obligation to show that Shakespeare bears any relation to the ancients
whatever, denying at the same time the value of the customary shows of
learning in discussing his work. For Shakespeare apparently drew little
from the