ve been so tedious in three acts, that I shall contract myself in the
two last. The beginning scenes of the fourth act are either added, or
changed wholly by me; the middle of it is Shakspeare's, altered and
mingled with my own; three or four of the last scenes are altogether
new; and the whole fifth act, both the plot and the writing, are my own
additions." O heavens! why was it not all "my own?"

No human being can have a right to use another in such a way as this.
Shakspeare's plays were then, and are now, as much his own property as
the property of the public--or rather, the public holds them in trust.
Dryden was a delinquent towards the dead. His crime was sacrilege. In
reading _his_ "Troilus and Cressida," you ever and anon fear you have
lost your senses. Bits of veritable Shakspearean gold, burnished
star-bright, embossed in pewter! Diamonds set in dirt! Sentences
illuminated with words of power, suddenly rising and sinking, through a
flare of fustian! Here Apollo's lute--there hurdy-gurdy.

"For the play itself," said Dryden insolently, "the author seems to have
begun it with some fire;" and here it is continued with much smoke. "The
characters of Pandarus and Thersites are promising enough;" here we
shudder at their performance. Such a monstrous Pandarus would have been
blackballed at the Pimp. Thersites--Shakspeare's Thersites--for Homer's
was another Thersites quite--finely called by Coleridge, "the Caliban of
demagogic life"--loses all individuality, and is but a brutal buffoon
grossly caricatured. The scene between Ulysses and Achilles, with its
wondrous wisdomful speech, is omitted! of itself, worth all the poetry
written between the Restoration and the Revolution.

Spirit of Glorious John! forgive, we beseech thee, truth-telling
Christopher--but angels and ministers of grace defend us! WHO ART THOU?
Shakspeare's ghost.

PROLOGUE, SPOKEN BY MR BETTERTON, REPRESENTING THE GHOST OF SHAKSPEARE.

"See, my loved Britons, see your Shakspeare rise,
An awful ghost confess'd to human eyes!
Unnamed, methinks, distinguish'd I had been
From other shades, by this eternal green,
About whose wreaths the vulgar poets strive,
And, with a touch, their wither'd bays revive.
Untaught, unpractised, in a barbarous age,
I found not, but created first the stage;
And if I drain'd no Greek or Latin store,
'Twas that my own abundance gave me more.
On foreign trade I needed not rely,
Like fruitful Br