Pope.—­The principal cause of my undertaking that task was zeal for the honour of Shakespeare; and, if you knew all his beauties as well as I, you would not wonder at this zeal.  No other author had ever so copious, so bold, so creative an imagination, with so perfect a knowledge of the passions, the humours, and sentiments of mankind.  He painted all characters, from kings down to peasants, with equal truth and equal force.  If human nature were destroyed, and no monument were left of it except his works, other beings might know what man was from those writings.

Boileau.—­You say he painted all characters, from kings down to peasants, with equal truth and equal force.  I can’t deny that he did so; but I wish he had not jumbled those characters together in the composition of his pictures as he has frequently done.

Pope.—­The strange mixture of tragedy, comedy, and farce in the same play, nay, sometimes in the same scene, I acknowledge to be quite inexcusable.  But this was the taste of the times when Shakespeare wrote.

Boileau.—­A great genius ought to guide, not servilely follow, the taste of his contemporaries.

Pope.—­Consider from how thick a darkness of barbarism the genius of Shakespeare broke forth!  What were the English, and what, let me ask you, were the French dramatic performances, in the age when he nourished?  The advances he made towards the highest perfection, both of tragedy and comedy, are amazing!  In the principal points, in the power of exciting terror and pity, or raising laughter in an audience, none yet has excelled him, and very few have equalled.

Boileau.—­Do you think that he was equal in comedy to Moliere?

Pope.—­In comic force I do; but in the fine and delicate strokes of satire, and what is called genteel comedy, he was greatly inferior to that admirable writer.  There is nothing in him to compare with the Misanthrope, the Ecole des Femmes, or Tartuffe.

Boileau.—­This, Mr. Pope, is a great deal for an Englishman to acknowledge.  A veneration for Shakespeare seems to be a part of your national religion, and the only part in which even your men of sense are fanatics.

Pope.—­He who can read Shakespeare, and be cool enough for all the accuracy of sober criticism, has more of reason than taste.

Boileau.—­I join with you in admiring him as a prodigy of genius, though I find the most shocking absurdities in his plays—­absurdities which no critic of my nation can pardon.

Pope.—­We will be satisfied with your feeling the excellence of his beauties.  But you would admire him still more if you could see the chief characters in all his test tragedies represented by an actor who appeared on the stage a little before I left the world.  He has shown the English nation more excellencies in Shakespeare than the quickest wits could discern, and has imprinted them on the heart with a livelier feeling than the most sensible natures had ever experienced without his help.