there is a certain air and spirit which perhaps the most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly apprehend, much less is it attainable by any study or industry.  Nay, though all the laws of heroic poem, all the laws of tragedy were exactly observed, yet still this tour entrejeant—­this poetic energy, if I may so call it, would be required to give life to all the rest; which shines through the roughest, most unpolished, and antiquated language, and may haply be wanting in the most polite and reformed.  Let us observe Spenser, with all his rusty, obsolete words, with all his rough-hewn clouterly verses; yet take him throughout, and we shall find in him a graceful and poetic majesty.  In like manner, Shakspere in spite of all his unfiled expressions, his rambling and indigested fancies—­the laughter of the critical—­yet must be confessed a poet above many that go beyond him to literature[5] some degrees.”

The laughter of the critical!  Let us pause upon the phrase, for it is a key to the whole attitude of the Augustan mind toward “our old tragick poet.”  Shakspere was already a national possession.  Indeed it is only after the Restoration that we find any clear recognition of him, as one of the greatest—­as perhaps himself the very greatest—­of the dramatists of all time.  For it is only after the Restoration that criticism begins.  “Dryden,” says Dr. Johnson, “may be properly considered as the father of English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine, upon principles, the merit of composition. . .  Dryden’s ’Essay of Dramatic Poesy’ [1667] was the first regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing."[6] The old theater was dead and Shakspere now emerged from amid its ruins, as the one unquestioned legacy of the Elizabethan age to the world’s literature.  He was not only the favorite of the people, but in a critical time, and a time whole canons of dramatic art were opposed to his practice, he united the suffrages of all the authoritative leader of literacy opinion.  Pope’s lines are conclusive as to the veneration in which Shakspere’s memory was held a century after his death.

    “On Avon’s banks, where flowers eternal blow,
    If I but ask, if any weed can grow;
    One tragic sentence if I dare deride
    Which Betterton’s grave action dignified . . . 
    How will our fathers rise up in a rage,
    And swear, all shame is lost in George’s age."[7]

The Shaksperian tradition is unbroken in the history of English literature and of the English theater.  His plays, in one form or another, have always kept the stage even in the most degenerate condition of public taste.[8] Few handsomer tributes have been paid to Shakspere’s genius than were paid in prose and verse, by the critics of our classical age, from Dryden to Johnson.  “To begin then with Shakspere,” says the former, in his “Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” “he was the man who, of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.”  And, in the prologue to his adaptation of “The Tempest,” he acknowledges that