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OLIVER GOLDSMITH, 1765
(1728-1774)

THE character of old Falstaff, even with all his faults, gives me more consolation than the most studied efforts of wisdom: I here behold an agreeable old fellow, forgetting age, and showing me the way to be young at sixty-five. Sure I am well able to be as merry, though not so comical, as he. Is it not in my power to have, though not so much wit, at least as much vivacity ?-Age, care, wisdom, reflection, begone!—I give you to the winds. Let's have t'other bottle: here's to the memory of Shakespeare, Falstaff, and all the merry men of Eastcheap.

Such were the reflections that naturally arose while I sat at the Boar's-head tavern, still kept at Eastcheap. Here, by a pleasant fire, in the very room where old Sir John Falstaff cracked his jokes, in the very chair which was sometimes honoured by Prince Henry, and sometimes polluted by his immoral merry companions, I sat and ruminated on the follies of youth; wished to be young again; but was resolved to make the best of life while it lasted, and now and then compared past and present times together.

"A Reverie at the Boar's Head Tavern in East

cheap." Collected Essays, 1765.

GEORGE, LORD LYTTELTON, 1765

(1709-1773)

"Boileau-Pope."

BOILEAU

... THE office of an editor was below you, and your mind was unfit for the drudgery it requires. Would anybody think of employing a Raphael to clean an old picture?

POPE

He

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. 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 cannot 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 donc.

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 flourished? 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 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.

Dialogues of the Dead, xiv., 4th edition, 1765.
XIV. Boileau-Pope, pp. 125-128.

Three editions of Dialogues of the Dead were published in 1760. Practically the whole of the passage quoted above appeared for the first time in the fourth edition in 1765.

LAURENCE STERNE, 1768
(1713-1768)

"The Passport-Versailles."

I COULD not conceive why the Count de B * * had gone so abruptly out of the room, any more than I could conceive why he had put the Shakespeare into his pocketMysteries which must explain themselves, are not worth the loss of time which a conjecture about them takes up: it was better to read Shakespeare; so, taking up Much Ado about Nothing, I transported myself instantly from the chair I sat in to Messina in Sicily, and got so busy with Don Pedro and Benedick and Beatrice, that I thought not of Versailles, the Count, or the Passport.

Sweet pliability of man's spirit, that can at once surrender itself to illusions, which cheat expectation and sorrow of their wearied moments!-long, long since had you numbered out my days, had I not trod so great a part of them upon this enchanted ground: when my way is too rough for my feet, or too steep for my strength, I get off it, to some smooth velvet path which fancy has scattered over with rosebuds of delights; and, having taken a few turns in it, come back strengthened and refreshed-When evils press sore upon me, and there is no retreat from them in this world, then I take a new course-I leave it—and as I have a clearer idea of the Elysian fields than I have of

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