The third quarter of the eighteenth century, and not the first quarter of the nineteenth, is the true period of transition in Shakespearian criticism. The dramatic rules had been finally deposed. The corrected plays were falling into disfavour, and though Shakespeare’s dramas were not yet acted as they were written, more respect was being paid to the originals. The sixty years’ controversy on the extent of his learning had ended by proving that the best commentary on him is the literature of his own age. At the same time there is a far-reaching change in the literary appreciations of Shakespeare, which announces the school of Coleridge and Hazlitt: his _characters_ now become the main topics of criticism. In the five essays on the _Tempest_ and _King Lear_ contributed by Joseph Warton to the _Adventurer_ in 1753-54, we can recognise the coming change in critical methods. He began them by giving in a sentence a summary of the common verdicts: “As Shakespeare is sometimes blamable for the conduct of his fables, which have no unity; and sometimes for his diction, which is obscure and turgid; so his characteristical excellences may possibly be reduced to these three general heads—his lively creative imagination, his strokes of nature and passion, and his preservation of the consistency of his characters.” Warton himself believed in the dramatic conventions. He objected to the Edmund story in _King Lear_ on the ground that it destroyed the unity of the fable. But he had the wisdom to recognise that irregularities in structure may be excused by the representation of the persons of the drama.(25) Accordingly, in his examination of the _Tempest_ and _King Lear_, he pays most attention to the characters, and relegates to a short closing paragraph his criticism of the development of the action. Though his method has nominally much in common with that of Maurice Morgann and the romantic critics, in practice it is very different. He treats the characters from without: he lacks the intuitive sympathy which is the secret of later criticism. To him the play is a representation of life, not a transcript from life. The characters, who are more real to us than actual persons of history, and more intimate than many an acquaintance, appear to him to be creatures of the imagination who live in a different world from his own. Warton describes the picture: he criticises the portraits of the characters rather than the characters themselves.