It is not mere fancy which has discerned a certain turning-point of importance to literature, in the fact that between the Fourth Folio and the first critical or quasi-critical edition (Rowe’s) there intervened (1685-1709) not quite a full quarter of a century. The successive editions of Rowe himself, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, and Johnson not merely have a certain critical interest in themselves, not merely illustrate the progress of criticism in a useful manner, but bring before us, as nothing else could do, the way in which Shakespeare himself was kept before the minds of the three generations of the eighteenth century.[328] [Sidenote: _Of Spenser._] Spenser’s fortunes in this way coincided with Shakespeare’s to a degree which cannot be quite accidental. The third folio of the _Faerie Queene_ appeared in 1679, and the first critical edition—that of Hughes—in 1715. But the study-stage—not the theatrical, considering a list of adapters which runs from Ravenscroft through Shadwell up to Dryden—had spared Shakespeare the attentions of the Person of Quality.[329] Before Hughes he had received those of Prior, a person of quality[330] much greater; but Prior had spoilt the stanza, and had travestied the diction almost worse than he did in the case of the _Nut-Browne Maid_. He would not really count in this story at all if his real services in other respects did not show that it was a case of “time and the hour,” and if his remarks in the Preface to _Solomon_ did not show, very remarkably, a genuine admiration of Spenser himself, and a strong dissatisfaction with the end-stopped couplet. And so of Hughes’ edition: yet perhaps the import of the saying may escape careless readers. At first one wonders why a man like Prior should have taken the trouble even to spoil the Spenserian stanza; why an editor like Hughes should have taken the much greater trouble to edit a voluminous poet whose most ordinary words he had to explain, whose stanza he also thought “defective,” and whose general composition he denounced as “monstrous” and so forth; why all the imitators[331] should have imitated what most of them at any rate seem to have regarded as chiefly parodiable. Yet one soon perceives that _mens agitat molem_, that the lump was leavened, that, as in one case at any rate (Shenstone’s), is known to be the fact, “those who came to scoff remained to pray.” They were dying of thirst, though they did not know how near the fountain was; and though they at first mistook that fountain and even profaned it, the healing virtues conquered them at last. [Sidenote: _Chaucer._]