peare lethargic--comatose!

Sir Walter's admiration of "glorious John" was so much part of his very
nature, that he says, "it is a bold, perhaps presumptuous, task to
attempt to separate the true from the false criticism in the foregoing
essay: for who is qualified to be umpire betwixt Shakspeare and Dryden?"
None that ever breathed, better than his own great and good self. Yet
surely he was wrong in saying, that when Shakspeare wrote for the stage,
"wit was not required." Required or not, there it was in perfection, of
which Dryden, with all his endowments, had no idea. The question is not
as he puts it, were those "audiences incapable of receiving the delights
which a cultivated mind derives from the gradual development of a story,
the just dependence of its parts upon each other, the minute beauties of
language, and the absence of every thing incongruous or indecorous?"
They may have been so, though we do not believe they were. But the
question is, are Shakspeare's Plays, beyond all that ever were written,
distinguished for those very excellences, and free from almost all those
very defects? That they are, few if any will now dare to deny. While
the best of Dryden's own Plays, and still more those of his forgotten
contemporaries, infinitely inferior to Shakspeare's in all those very
excellences, are choke-full of all manner of faults and flagrant sins
against decorum and congruity, in the eyes of mere taste; and with a few
exceptions, according to no rules can be rated high as works of art. The
truth of all this manifestly forced itself upon Sir Walter's seldom
erring judgment, as he proceeded in the composition of the elaborate
note, in which he would fain have justified Dryden even at the expense
of Shakspeare. And, as it now stands, though beautifully written, it
swarms with _non-sequiturs_, and perplexing half-truths.

In the Preface to "Troilus and Cressida," (1679,) Dryden again--and for
the last time--descants, in the same unsatisfactory strain, on
Shakspeare. AEschylus, he tells us, was held in the same veneration by
the Athenians of after ages as Shakspeare by his countrymen. But in the
age of that poet, the Greek tongue had arrived at its full perfection,
and they had among them an exact standard of writing and speaking;
whereas the English language, even in his (Dryden's) own age, was
wanting in the very foundation of certainty, "a perfect grammar:" so,
what must it have been in Shakspeare's time?