my sincere opinion of it, and left it with me for three or four days. I gave him my opinion of it sincerely, which was, 'that I thought he had better not act it, and that he would get reputation enough by only printing it.' This I said as thinking the lines well written, but the piece not theatrical enough. Some time after Mr. Addison said 'that his own opinion was the same with mine, but that some particular friends of his, whom he could not disoblige, insisted on its being acted.'"[53] Undoubtedly, Pope was right in principle, and anybody who reads the thirty-ninth paper in the _Spectator_ may see not only that Addison was out of sympathy with the traditions of the English stage, but that his whole turn of thought disqualified him from comprehending the motives of dramatic composition. "The modern drama," says he, "excels that of Greece and Rome in the intricacy and disposition of the fable--but, what a Christian writer would be ashamed to own, falls infinitely short of it in the moral part of the performance." And the entire drift of the criticism that follows relates to the thought, the sentiment, and the expression of the modern drama, rather than to the really essential question, the nature of the action. It is false criticism to say that the greatest dramas of Shakespeare fail in morality as compared with those of the Greek tragedians. That the manner in which the moral is conveyed is different in each case is of course true, since the subjects of Greek tragedy were selected from Greek mythology, and were treated by Æschylus and Sophocles, at all events, in a religious spirit, whereas the plays of Shakespeare are only indirectly Christian, and produce their effect by an appeal to the individual conscience. None the less is it the case that _Macbeth_, _Hamlet_, and _Lear_ have for modern audiences a far deeper moral meaning than the _Agamemnon_ or the _Oedipus Tyrannus_. The tragic motive in Greek tragedy is the impotence of man in the face of moral law or necessity; in Shakespeare's tragedies it is the corruption of the will, some sin of the individual against the law of God, which brings its own punishment. There was nothing in this principle of which a Christian dramatist need have been ashamed; and as regards Shakespeare, at any rate, it is evident that Addison's criticism is unjust.