one another very strongly in
their treatment of Shakspeare. Both of them seem at times to have
perfectly understood and felt his greatness, and both of them have
indited glorious things in its exaltation. Their praise is the utterance
of worship. You might believe them on their knees before an idol. But
theirs is a strange kind of reverence. It alternates with derision, and
is compatible with contempt. The god sinks into the man and the man is a
barbarian, babbling uncouth speech. "Coarse," "ungrammatical,"
"obscure," "affected," "unintelligible," "rusty!" The words distilled
from the lips of Cordelia, Desdemona, Juliet, Imogen!

Dryden informs us, that ages after the death of AEschylus, the Athenians
ordained an equal reward to the poets who could alter his plays to be
acted in the theatre, with those whose productions were wholly new, and
of their own. But the case, he laments, is not the same in England,
though the difficulties are greater. AEschylus wrote good Greek,
Shakspeare bad English; and to make it intelligible to a refined
audience was a hard job. Sorely "pestered with figurative expressions"
must have been the transmogrifier; and he had to look for wages, not to
a nation's gratitude, but a manager's greed. It was, indeed, a desperate
expedient for raising the funds. In his judgment the Play itself was but
a poor affair--an attempt by an apprentice, that, to be producible,
required the shaping of a master's hand. "Lamely left" it had to be set
on its feet ere it could tread the stage. With what _nonchalance_ does
he throw out "unnecessary persons," and improve "unfinished!" Hector,
Troilus, Pandarus, and Thersites, skilless Shakspeare had but
begun--artful Dryden made an end of them; Cressida, who was false as she
was fair, yet left alive to deceive more men, became a paragon of truth,
chastity, and suicide; and by an amazing stretch of invention, far
beyond the Swan's, was added Andromache. Dryden proudly announces that
"the scenes of Pandarus and Cressida, of Troilus and Pandarus, of
Andromache with Hector and the Trojans, in the second act, are wholly
new; together with that of Nestor and Ulysses with Thersites, and that
of Thersites with Ajax and Achilles. I will not weary my reader with the
scenes which are added of Pandarus and the lovers in the third, and
those of Thersites, which are wholly altered; but I cannot omit the last
scene in it, which is almost half the act, betwixt Troilus and Hector. I
ha