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It is not very grateful to consider how little the succession of editors has added to this author’s power of pleasing. He was read, admired, studied, and imitated, while he was yet deformed with all the improprieties which ignorance and neglect could accumulate upon him; while the reading was yet not rectified, nor his allusions understood; yet then did Dryden pronounce “that Shakespeare was the man, who, of all modern and, perhaps, ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those, who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned: he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat and insipid; his comick wit degenerating into clinches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,

Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.”

It is to be lamented that such a writer should want a commentary; that his language should become obsolete, or his sentiments obscure. But it is vain to carry wishes beyond the condition of human things; that which must happen to all, has happened to Shakespeare, by accident and time; and more than has been suffered by any other writer since the use of types[23], has been suffered by him through his own negligence of fame, or, perhaps, by that superiority of mind, which despised its own performances, when it compared them with its powers, and judged those works unworthy to be preserved, which the criticks of following ages were to contend for the fame of restoring and explaining.

Among these candidates of inferiour fame, I am now to stand the judgment of the publick; and wish that I could confidently produce my commentary as equal to the encouragement which I have had the honour of receiving. Every work of this kind is by its nature deficient, and I should feel little solicitude about the sentence, were it to be pronounced only by the skilful and the learned.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Dr. Johnson’s Preface first appeared in 1765. Malone’s Shakespeare, i. 108. and Boswell’s Life of Johnson, i.

[2] Est vetus atque probus, centum qui perficit annos. Hon. Ep. II. 1. v. 39.

[3] With all respect for our great critic’s memory we must maintain, that love has the greatest influence on the sum of life: and every popular tale or poem derives its main charm and power of pleasing from the incidents of this universal passion. Other passions have, undoubtedly, their sway, but love, when it does prevail, like Aaron’s rod, swallows up every feeling beside. It is one thing to introduce the fulsome badinage of compliment with which French tragedy abounds, and another to exhibit the

–“very ecstacy of love:
Whose violent property foredoes itself,
And leads the will to desperate undertakings,
As oft as any passion under heaven,
That does afflict our natures.”–
HAMLET. Act ii. Sc. i.

[4]
Quaerit quod nusquam est gentium, repent tamen.
Facit illud verisimile, quod mendacrium est.
PLAUTI PSEUDOLUS, Act i. Sc. 4.

Ficta voluptatis causa, sint proxima veris. HOR. ARS POET, 338.

See too the celebrated passage of Shakespeare himself– Midsummer-night’s Dream, Act v. Sc. 1; and Idler, 84.–Ed.

[5] The judgment of French poets on these points may be inferred from the tenour of Boileau’s admonitions:

Gardez donc de donner, ainsi que dans Clelie,
L’air ni l’esprit francois a l’antique Italie;
Et, sous des noms romains faisant notre portrait,
Peindre Caton galant, et Brutus dameret.
Art Poetique, iii.–Ed.