English stage and to form it on the model of the ancients, gave it as
his opinion that Shakespeare did not blot enough, and that, as he did
not possess much school-learning, he owed more to nature than to art.
The learned, and sometimes rather pedantic Milton was also of this
opinion, when he says--

Our sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child,
Warbles his native wood-notes wild.

Yet it is highly honorable to Milton that the sweetness of
Shakespeare, the quality which of all others has been least allowed,
was felt and acknowledged by him. The modern editors, both in their
prefaces, which may be considered as so many rhetorical exercises in
praise of the poet, and in their remarks on separate passages, go
still farther. Judging them by principles which are not applicable to
them, not only do they admit the irregularity of his pieces, but, on
occasion, they accuse him of bombast, of a confused, ungrammatical,
and conceited mode of writing, and even of the most contemptible
buffoonery. Pope asserts that he wrote both better and worse than any
other man. All the scenes and passages which did not square with the
littleness of his own taste, he wished to place to the account of
interpolating players; and he was on the right road, had his opinion
been taken, of giving us a miserable dole of a mangled Shakespeare. It
is, therefore, not to be wondered at if foreigners, with the exception
of the Germans latterly, have, in their ignorance of him, even
improved upon these opinions.[15] They speak in general of
Shakespeare's plays as monstrous productions, which could have been
given to the world only by a disordered imagination in a barbarous
age; and Voltaire crowns the whole with more than usual assurance
when he observes that _Hamlet_, the profound masterpiece of the