The shows and bustle with which his plays abound have the same original.  As knowledge advances, pleasure passes from the eye to the ear, but returns, as it declines, from the ear to the eye.  Those to whom our author’s labours were exhibited had more skill in pomps or processions than in poetical language, and, perhaps, wanted some visible and discriminated events, as comments on the dialogue.  He knew how he should most please; and whether his practice is more agreeable to nature, or whether his example has prejudiced the nation, we still find that on our stage something must be done as well as said, and inactive declamation is very coldly heard, however musical or elegant, passionate or sublime.

Voltaire expresses his wonder, that our author’s extravagancies are endured by a nation, which has seen the tragedy of Cato.  Let him be answered, that Addison speaks the language of poets, and Shakespeare of men.  We find in Cato innumerable beauties, which enamour us of its author, but we see nothing that acquaints us with human sentiments or human actions; we place it with the fairest and the noblest progeny which judgment propagates by conjunction with learning; but Othello is the vigorous and vivacious offspring of observation impregnated by genius.  Cato affords a splendid exhibition of artificial and fictitious manners, and delivers just and noble sentiments, in diction easy, elevated, and harmonious, but its hopes and fears communicate no vibration to the heart; the composition refers us only to the writer; we pronounce the name of Cato, but we think on Addison.

The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity.  Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and polished into brightness.  Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals.

It has been much disputed, whether Shakespeare owed his excellence to his own native force, or whether he had the common helps of scholastick education, the precepts of critical science, and the examples of ancient authors.

There has always prevailed a tradition, that Shakespeare wanted learning, that he had no regular education, nor much skill in the dead languages.  Jonson, his friend, affirms, that “he had small Latin and less Greek;” who, besides that he had no imaginable temptation to falsehood, wrote at a time when the character and acquisitions of Shakespeare were known to multitudes.  His evidence ought, therefore, to decide the controversy, unless some testimony of equal force could be opposed[12].