ment and the course of the
action."

Yet, in spite of all these distortions of the great originals, in
conformity with the taste of corrupt courts, the love and admiration of
the English people for the dramas as Shakspere wrote them was attested
by more than twenty complete and critical editions of his works before
the end of the eighteenth century; and the high estimate of his genius
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was never questioned
until 1904, when Professor Barrett Wendell, in his "Temper of the
Seventeenth Century in English Literature," discovered and revealed to
the world that Shakspere, except as a "phrase-maker" and except as the
inventor of "historical fiction" in "Henry IV." and "Henry V.," was "the
most skilful and instinctive imitator among the early Elizabethan
dramatists," and "remained till the end an instinctively imitative
follower of fashions set by others."

It had taken nearly three centuries of time and the researches of
countless scholars to make the discovery, and they had all failed except
Professor Wendell. During Shakspere's life and after his death, none of
his contemporaries ever accused him of imitating "fashions set by
others"; none of them, except the profligate Greene, of "beautifying
himself with others' feathers."

Edmund Malone, by what may be called digital criticism, undertook to
prove that Shakspere, in the second and third parts of "Henry VI.,"
stole 1771 lines from the "Contention," originally written by another
hand, remodelled 2373 lines, and added 1899 of his own; but even Malone
did not charge that Shakspere imitated the author of the "Contention";
his argument, if it had not been conclusively answered again and again,
would prove that Shakspere was "the most unblushing plagiarist that ever
put pen to paper."

But long before Malone came Lessing, who in 1759 led the successful
attack upon the pseudo-classicism of the French dramatists, proved that
the three unities were but the articles of an outworn creed, and in
1758, that Shakspere was something more than a successful playwright,
more than the successful rival of Marlowe and Kyd and Dekker and
Beaumont and Fletcher, more than "the master of the revels to mankind,"
and led critical opinion to the conclusion that he was the foremost man
of his time and of all time, with power to search the secrets of all
hearts, to measure the abysses of all passion, to portray the weakness
of all human foibles, to crea