not help suspecting
he includes some of his greatest beauties. While we do not defend his
quibbles and carwitchets, as Bibber would have termed them, we may
rejoice that he purchased, at so slight a sacrifice, the power and
privilege of launching into every subject with a liberty as unbounded
as his genius;

As there is music, uninformed by art,
In those wild notes, which, with a merry heart,
The birds in unfrequented shades express,
Which better taught at home, yet please us less.

Footnotes:
1. In mitigation of the censure which must be passed on our author for
this hasty and ill-considered judgment, let us remember the very
inaccurate manner in which Shakespeare's plays were printed in the
early editions.

2. Mr Malone has judiciously remarked, that Dryden seems to have been
ignorant of the order in which Shakespeare wrote his plays; and
there will be charity in believing, that he was not intimately
acquainted with those he so summarily and unjustly censures.

3. In these criticisms, we see the effects of the refinement which our
stage had now borrowed from the French. It is probable, that, in
the age of heroic plays, any degree of dulness, or extravagance,
would have been tolerated in the dialogue, rather than an offence
against the decorum of the scene.

4. Jonson seems to have used it for to _go on against_.

5. The Apollo was Ben Jonson's favourite club-room in the Devil
Tavern. The custom of adopting his admirers and imitators, by
bestowing upon them the title of Son, is often alluded to in his
works. In Dryden's time, the fashion had so far changed, that the
poetical progeny of old Ben seem to have incurred more ridicule
than honour by this ambitious distinction. Oldwit, in Shadwell's
play, called Bury Fair, is described as "a paltry old-fashioned wit
and punner of the last age, that pretends to have been one of Ben
Jonson's sons, and to have seen plays at the Blackfriars."

6. This passage, though complimentary to Charles, contains much sober
truth: Having considerable taste for the Belles Lettres, he
cultivated them during his exile, and was naturally swayed by the
French rules of composition, particularly as applicable to the
Theatre. These he imported with him at his Restoration; and hence
arose the Heroic Drama, so much cultivated by our author.

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