It is a bold, perhaps a presumptuous task, to attempt to separate the true from the false criticism in the foregoing essay; for who is qualified to be umpire betwixt Shakespeare and Dryden?  Nevertheless, our knowledge of the manners of the respective ages which these extraordinary men adorned, and the remoteness of our own from both, may enable us, with impartiality at least, to sift the grounds of Dryden’s censure.  The nature of the stage in the days of Shakespeare has been ascertained, by the sedulous exertions of his commentators.  A variety of small theatres, all of them accessible to the lowest of the people, poor and rude in all the arts of decoration, were dispersed through London when Shakespeare and Jonson wrote for the stage.  It was a natural consequence, that the writings of these great men were biassed by the taste of those, for whom they wrote;

  For those, who live to please, must please, to live.

Art was not demanded; and when used by Jonson, he complains it was not duly appreciated.  Men of a middle rank were then probably worse educated than our mere vulgar.  But the good old time bore rough and manly spirits, who came prepared with a tribute of tears and laughter, to bursts of pathos, or effusions of humour, although incapable of receiving the delights which a cultivated mind derives from the gradual developement 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.  Dryden, on the other hand, wrote for a stage patronized by a monarch and his courtiers, who were professed judges of dramatic composition; while the rigour of religious prejudice, and perhaps a just abhorrence of the licentious turn of the drama, banished from the theatres a great proportion of the middle classes, always the most valuable part of an audience; because, with a certain degree of cultivation, they unite an unhacknied energy of feeling.  Art, therefore, became, in the days of Dryden, not only a requisite qualification, but even the principal attribute of the dramatic poet.  He was to address himself to the heads and judgments of his audience, on the acuteness of which they piqued themselves; not to their feelings, stupified, probably, by selfish dissipation.  Even the acquisition and exercise of critical knowledge tends to blunt the sense of natural beauties, as a refined harmonist becomes indifferent to the strains of simple melody.  Hence the sacrifices which Shakespeare made, without being aware, to the taste of his age, were amply compensated by his being called upon, and, as it were, compelled, by the nature of his audience, to rouse them with his thunder, and to melt them with his dew.  I question much if the age of Charles II. would have borne the introduction of Othello or Falstaff.  We may find something like Dryden’s self-complacent opinion expressed by the editor of Corneille, where he civilly admits, “Corneille etoit inegal comme Shakespeare,