d already vindicated the national
pride in Shakespeare. That his views soon became the commonplaces of those
critics who strike the average of current opinion, is shown by such a work
as William Cooke's _Elements of Dramatic Criticism_ (1775). But traces of
the school of Rymer are still to be found, and nowhere more strongly than
in the anonymous _Cursory Remarks on Tragedy_ (1774). In this little
volume of essays the dramatic rules are defended against the criticism of
Johnson by a lame repetition of the arguments which Johnson had
overthrown. Even Pope is said to have let his partiality get the better of
his usual justice and candour when he claimed that Shakespeare was not to
be judged by what were called the rules of Aristotle. There are laws, this
belated critic urges, which bind each individual as a citizen of the
world; and once again we read that the rules of the classical drama are in
accordance with human reason. This book is the last direct descendant of
Rymer's _Short View_. The ancestral trait appears in the question whether
Shakespeare was in general even a good tragic writer. But it is a
degenerate descendant. If it has learned good manners, it is unoriginal
and dull; and it is so negligible that it has apparently not been thought
worth while to settle the question of its authorship.(16)

II.

The discussion on Shakespeare's attitude to the dramatic rules was closely
connected with the long controversy on the extent of his learning. The
question naturally suggested itself how far his dramatic method was due to
his ignorance of the classics. Did he know the rules and ignore them, or
did he write with no knowledge of the Greek and Roman models? Whichever
view the critics adopted, one and all felt they were arguing for the
honour of Shakespeare. If some would prove for his greater glory that
parallel passages were due to direct borrowing, others held it was more to
his credit to have known nothing of the classics and to have equalled or
surpassed them by the mere force of unassisted genius.

The controversy proper begins with Rowe's _Account of Shakespeare_. On
this subject, as on others, Rowe expresses the tradition of the
seventeenth century. His view is the same as Dryden's, and Dryden had
accepted Jonson's statement that Shakespeare had "small Latin and less
Greek." Rowe believes that his acquaintance with Latin authors was such as
he might have gained at school: he could remember tags of Horace