There is little about the rules in Pope’s Preface. That Pope respected them cannot be doubted, else he would not have spoken so well of Rymer, and in the critical notes added to his Homer we should not hear so much of Le Bossu’s treatise on the Epic.(11) But Pope was a discreet man, who knew when to be silent. He regarded it as a misfortune that Shakespeare was not so circumstanced as to be able to write on the model of the ancients, but, unlike the pedant theorists, he refused to judge Shakespeare by the rules of a foreign drama. Much the same is to be said of Addison. His belief in the rules appears in his _Cato_. His over-rated criticism of _Paradise Lost_ is little more than a laboured application of the system of Le Bossu. But in the _Spectator_ he too urges that Shakespeare is not to be judged according to the rules. “Our critics do not seem sensible,” he writes, “that there is more beauty in the works of a great genius who is ignorant of the rules of art than in those of a little genius who knows and observes them. Our inimitable Shakespeare is a stumbling-block to the whole tribe of these rigid critics. Who would not rather read one of his plays where there is not a single rule of the stage observed, than any production of a modern critic where there is not one of them violated?”(12) The rigid critics continued to find fault with the structure of Shakespeare’s plays. In the articles in the _Adventurer_ on the _Tempest_ and _King Lear_, Joseph Warton repeats the standard objection to tragi-comedy and underplots. In the _Biographia Britannica_ we still find it stated that Shakespeare set himself to please the populace, and that the people “had no notion of the rules of writing, or the model of the Ancients.” But one whose tastes were classical, both by nature and by training, had been thinking out the matter for himself. It was only after long reflection, and with much hesitation, that Johnson had disavowed what had almost come to be considered the very substance of the classical faith. In his _Irene_ he had bowed to the rules; he had, however, begun to suspect them by the time he wrote the _Rambler_, and in the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare suspicion has become conviction. His sturdy common sense and independence of judgment led him to anticipate much of what has been supposed to be the discovery of the romantic school. His Preface has received scant justice. There is no more convincing criticism of the neo-classical doctrines.(13)