vaguely to the influence of "a nameless crowd of obscure
writers," and thinks it fortunate that Shakspere was unacquainted with
classical rules. The critic had evidently made no attempt to define the
influence of particular writers upon Shakspere. His criticism is at some
points purely conventional, as for instance when he calls the poet "that
powerful magician, whose art could fascinate us even by means of
deformity itself "; but on the whole Scott seems to write about
Shakspere in a very reasonable and discriminating way.

He has a good deal to say of Ben Jonson, in other places as well as in
this Essay on the Drama.[145] He was evidently well acquainted with that
poet, and admired him without liking him. Somewhere he calls him "the
dry and dogged Jonson,"[146] and again he speaks of his genius in very
high terms. The contrast between Shakspere and Jonson moved him even to
epigram:[147] "In reading Shakespeare we often meet passages so
congenial to our nature and feelings that, beautiful as they are, we can
hardly help wondering they did not occur to ourselves; in studying
Jonson, we have often to marvel how his conceptions could have occurred
to any human being." It was characteristic of Scott to note the fact
that Shakspere wrote rapidly, Jonson slowly, for he was fond of getting
support for his theory that rapid writing is the better.

As early as 1804 Scott referred to _The Changeling_ as "an old play
which contains some passages horribly striking,"[148] and in so doing
voiced, as Mr. Swinburne says, "the first word of modern tribute to the
tragic genius of Thomas Middleton."[149] Scott also praised Massinger
highly, especially for his strength in characterization, and once called
him "the most gentleman-like of all the old English dramatists."[150] He
discussed Beaumont and Fletcher sympathetically, for he knew them well
and frequently quoted from them. He named Shirley, Ford, Webster, and
Dekker in a group, and spoke of the singular profusion of talents
devoted in this period to the writing of plays, an observation which is
made more explicitly later in the _Journal_, when he has just been
reading an old play which, he says, "worthless in the extreme, is, like
many of the plays in the beginning of the seventeenth century, written
to a good tune. The dramatic poets of that time seem to have possessed
as joint-stock a highly poetical and abstract tone of language, so that
the worst of them often remind you of the