It would be easy, but it would be tedious, to multiply proofs of this patronizing attitude toward Shakspere.  Perhaps Pope voices the general sentiment of his school, as fairly as anyone, in the last words of his preface.[16] “I will conclude by saying of Shakspere that, with all his faults and with all the irregularity of his drama, one may look upon his works, in comparison of those that are more finished and regular, as upon an ancient, majestic piece of Gothic architecture compared with a neat, modern building.  The latter is more elegant and glaring, but the former is more strong and solemn. . .  It has much the greater variety, and much the nobler apartments, though we are often conducted to them by dark, odd and uncouth passages.  Nor does the whole fail to strike us with greater reverence, though many of the parts are childish, ill-placed and unequal to its grandeur.”  This view of Shakspere continued to be the rule until Coleridge and Schlegel taught the new century that this child of fancy was, in reality, a profound and subtle artist, but that the principles of his art—­as is always the case with creative genius working freely and instinctively—­were learned by practice, in the concrete, instead of being consciously thrown out by the workman himself into an abstract theoria; so that they have to be discovered by a reverent study of his work and lie deeper than the rules of French criticism.  Schlegel, whose lectures on dramatic art were translated into English in 1815, speaks with indignation of the current English misunderstanding of Shakspere.  “That foreigners, and Frenchmen in particular, who frequently speak in the strangest language about antiquity and the Middle Age, as if cannibalism had been first put an end in Europe by Louis XIV., should entertain this opinion of Shakspere might be pardonable.  But that Englishmen should adopt such a calumniation . . . is to me incomprehensible."[17]

The beginnings of the romantic movement in England were uncertain.  There was a vague dissent from current literary estimates, a vague discontent with reigning literary modes, especially with the merely intellectual poetry then in vogue, which did not feed the soul.  But there was, at first, no conscious, concerted effort toward something of creative activity.  The new group of poets, partly contemporaries of Pope, partly successors to him—­Thomson, Shenstone, Dyer, Akenside, Gray, Collins, and the Warton brothers—­found their point of departure in the loving study and revival of old authors.  From what has been said of the survival of Shakspere’s influence it might be expected that his would have been the name paramount among the pioneers of English romanticism.  There are several reasons why this was not the case.