Morgann’s book did not meet with the attention which it deserved, nor to this day has its importance been fully recognised. Despite his warnings, his contemporaries regarded it simply as a defence of Falstaff’s courage. One spoke of him as a paradoxical critic, and others doubted if he meant what he said. All were unaccountably indifferent to his main purpose. The book was unknown even to Hazlitt, who in the preface to his _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_ alludes only to Whately(31) and Richardson as his English predecessors. Yet it is the true forerunner of the romantic criticism of Shakespeare. Morgann’s attitude to the characters is the same as Coleridge’s and Hazlitt’s; his criticism, neglecting all formal matters, resolves itself into a study of human nature. It was he who first said that Shakespeare’s creations should be treated as historic rather than as dramatic beings. And the keynote of his criticism is that “the impression is the fact.” He states what he _feels_, and he explains the reason in language which is barely on this side idolatry.(32) The Essays. Nicholas Rowe. Nicholas Rowe’s _Account of the Life, etc., of Mr. William Shakespear_ forms the introduction to his edition of Shakespeare’s plays (1709, 6 vols., 8vo). Rowe has the double honour of being the first editor of the plays of Shakespeare and the first to attempt an authoritative account of his life. The value of the biography can best be judged by comparing it with the accounts given in such books as Fuller’s _Worthies of England_ (1662), Phillips’s _Theatrum Poetarum_ (1675), Winstanley’s _English Poets_ (1687), Langbaine’s _English Dramatick Poets_ (1691), Pope Blount’s _Remarks upon Poetry_ (1694), or Jeremy Collier’s _Historical and Poetical Dictionary_ (1701). Though some of the traditions—for which he has acknowledged his debt to Betterton—are of doubtful accuracy, it is safe to say that but for Rowe they would have perished. The _Account of Shakespeare_ was the standard biography during the eighteenth century. It was reprinted by Pope, Hanmer, Warburton, Johnson, Steevens, Malone, and Reed; but they did not give it in the form in which Rowe had left it. Pope took the liberty of condensing and rearranging it, and as he did not acknowledge what he had done, his silence led other editors astray. Those who did note the alterations presumed that they had been made by Rowe himself in the second edition in 1714. Steevens, for instance, states that he publishes the life from “Rowe’s second edition, in which it had been abridged and altered by himself after its appearance in 1709.” But what Steevens reprints is Rowe’s _Account of Shakespeare_ as edited by Pope. In this volume the _Account_ is given in its original form for the first time since 1714.