:

If there be, what I believe there is, in every nation, a stile which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology fo confonant and congenial to the analogy and principles of its respective language, as to remain fettled and unaltered; this stile is probably to be fought in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be understood, without ambition of elegance. The polite are always catching modish innovations, and the learned depart from established forms of speech, in hope of finding or making better; those who wish for distinction forfake the vulgar, when the vulgar is right; but there is a conversation above groffness and below refinement, where propriety refides, and where this poet feems to have gathered his comick dialogue. He is therefore more agreeable to the ears of the prefent age than any other author equally remote, and among his other excellencies deserves to be studied as one of the original masters of our language.

These observations are to be confidered not as unexceptionably conftant, but as containing general and predominant truth. Shakespeare's familiar dialogue is affirmed to be smooth and clear, yet not wholly without ruggedness or difficulty; as a country may be eminently fruitful, though it has spots unfit for cultivation: his characters are praised as natural, though their fentiments are sometimes forced, and their actions improbable; as the earth upon the whole is fpherical, though its furface is varied with protuberances and cavities.

Shake

Shakespeare with his excellencies has likewise faults, and faults fufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit. I shall shew them in the proportion in which they appear to me, without envious malignity or fuperftitious veneration. No question can be more innocently difcuffed than a dead poet's pretenfions to renown; and little regard is due to that bigotry which fets candor higher than truth.

His first defect is that to which may be imputed most of the evil in books or in men. He facrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to pleafe than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose. From his writings indeed a system of focial duty may be felected, for he that thinks reasonably must think morally; but his precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to shew in the virtuous a difapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and leaves their examples to operate by chance. This fault the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate; for it is always a writer's duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue independent on time or place.

The plots are often so loofely formed, that a very flight confideration may improve them, and so carelessly pursued, that he seems not always fully to comprehend his own design. He omits opportunities of instructing or delighting, which the train of his story feems to force upon him, and apparently rejects thofe those exhibitions which would be more affecting, for the fake of those which are more easy.

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It may be observed, that in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of his reward, he shortened the labour to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented.

He had no regard to diftinction of time or place, but gives to one age or nation, without fcruple, the customs, institutions, and opinions of another, at the expence not only of likelihood, but of possibility. These faults Pope has endeavoured, with more zeal than judgment, to transfer to his imagined interpolators. We need not wonder to find Hector quoting Ariftotle, when we fee the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothick mythology of fairies. Shakespeare, indeed, was not the only violator of chronology, for in the fame age Sidney, who wanted not the advantages of learning, has, in his Arcadia, confounded the pastoral with the feudal times, the days of innocence, quiet, and security, with those of turbulence, violence, and ad

venture.

In his comick scenes he is seldom very fuccessful, when he engages his characters in reciprocations of fmartness and contests of farcasm; their jests are commonly gross, and their pleasantry licentious; neither his gentlemen nor his ladies have much delicacy, nor

are

are sufficiently distinguished from his clowns by any appearance of refined manners. Whether he represented the real conversation of his time is not easy to determine; the reign of Elizabeth is commonly fupposed to have been a time of stateliness, formality, and reserve, yet perhaps the relaxations of that feverity were not very elegant. There must, however, have been always some modes of gaiety preferable to others, and a writer ought to choose the best.

In tragedy his performance seems constantly to be worse, as his labour is more. The effusions of pafsion, which exigence forces out, are for the most part striking and energetick; but whenever he folicits his invention, or strains his faculties, the offspring of his throes is tumour, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity.

In narration he affects a disproportionate pomp of diction, and a wearisome train of circumlocution, and tells the incident imperfectly in many words, which might have been more plainly delivered in few. Narration in dramatick poetry is naturally tedious, as it is unanimated and inactive, and obstructs the progress of the action; it should therefore always be rapid, and enlivened by frequent interruption. Shakespeare found it an encumbrance, and instead of lightening it by brevity, endeavoured to recommend it by dignity and splendor.

His declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak, for his power was the power of nature; when he endeavoured, like other tragick writers,

VOL. I.

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writers, to catch opportunities of amplification, and instead of inquiring what the occafion demanded, to shew how much his stores of knowledge could fupply, he feldom escapes without the pity or refentment of his reader.

It is incident to him to be now-and-then entangled with an unwieldy fentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles with it a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be difentangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it.

Not that always where the language is intricate the thought is fubtle, or the image always great where the line is bulky; the equality of words to things is very often neglected, and trivial fentiments and vulgar ideas disappoint the attention, to which they are recommended by fonorous epithets and swelling figures.

But the admirers of this great poet have never lefs reason to indulge their hopes of fupreme excellence, than when he seems fully resolved to fink them in dejection, and mollify them with tender emotions by the fall of greatness, the danger of innocence, or the croffes of love. He is not long foft and pathetick without some idle conceit, or contemptible equivocation. He no fooner begins to move, than he counteracts himself; and terror and pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by fudden frigidity.