re paid no heed to poetic justice ... "the good and
bad perishing promiscuously in the best of his tragedies, so that there
can be either none or very weak instruction in them." Gildon sums up his
opinion by the sententious remark that "his beauties are buried beneath
a heap of ashes, isolated and fragmentary like the ruins of a temple, so
that there is no harmony in them."

Against all this arraignment by the imitators of the French drama, we
have that loving tribute of the great Milton:--

"Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy Name.
Thou, in our wonder and astonishment,
Hast built thyself a live-long monument."

Pope could not resist the charm of his unacknowledged master. But Pope
praises Dryden, Denham, and Waller,--never a word of commendation for
Shakspere: "he is not correct, not classic; he has almost as many
defects as beauties; his dramas want plan, are defective and irregular
in construction; he keeps the tragic and comic as little apart as he
does the different epochs and nations in which the scenes of his plays
are laid; the unity of action, of place, and of time is violated in
every scene."

The eighteenth century was notable for its corrections and remodellings,
reducing the grandeur of the originals to the levels of the critics.
Lord Lansdowne degraded Shylock into the clown of the play; it was
"furnished with music and other ornamentation, enriched with a musical
masque, 'Peleus and Thetis,' and with a banqueting scene in which the
Jew," dining apart from the rest, drinks to his God, Money. Gildon
mangled "Measure for Measure" and provided it with "musical
entertainments." The Duke of Buckingham divided "Julius Caesar" into two
tragedies with choruses. Worsdale reduced "The Taming of the Shrew" to a
vaudeville, and Lampe "trimmed 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' into an
opera." Garrick adapted "Romeo and Juliet" to the stage of his time, by
allowing Juliet to awake before Romeo had died of the poison, "The
Tempest" by furnishing it with songs, "The Taming of the Shrew" by
cutting it down to a farce in three acts.

Even the great Samuel Johnson said that Shakspere "sacrifices virtue to
convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct that
he seems to write without any moral purpose." ... "His plots are often
so loosely formed that a very slight consideration may improve them, and
so carelessly pursued that he seems n