sage_--

are 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 Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare, 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 Shakspeare 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.[10]--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 Shakspeare'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 rea