Even those who are willing to give the eighteenth century its due have not recognised how it appreciated Shakespeare. At no time in this century was he not popular. The author of _Esmond_ tells us that Shakespeare was quite out of fashion until Steele brought him back into the mode.(1) Theatrical records would alone be sufficient to show that the ascription of this honour to Steele is an injustice to his contemporaries. In the year that the _Tatler_ was begun, Rowe brought out his edition of the “best of our poets”; and a reissue was called for five years later. It is said by Johnson(2) that Pope’s edition drew the public attention to Shakespeare’s works, which, though often mentioned, had been little read. Henceforward there was certainly an increase in the number of critical investigations, but if Shakespeare had been little read, how are we to explain the coffee-house discussions of which we seem to catch echoes in the periodical literature? The allusions in the _Spectator_, or the essays in the _Censor_, must have been addressed to a public which knew him. Dennis, who “read him over and over and still remained unsatiated,” tells how he was accused, by blind admirers of the poet, of lack of veneration, because he had ventured to criticise, and how he had appealed from a private discussion to the judgment of the public. “Above all I am pleased,” says the _Guardian_, “in observing that the Tragedies of Shakespeare, which in my youthful days have so frequently filled my eyes with tears, hold their rank still, and are the great support of our theatre.”(3) Theobald could say that “this author is grown so universal a book that there are very few studies or collections of books, though small, amongst which it does not hold a place”; and he could add that “there is scarce a poet that our English tongue boasts of who is more the subject of the Ladies’ reading.”(4) It would be difficult to explain away these statements. The critical interest in Shakespeare occasioned by Pope’s edition may have increased the knowledge of him, but he had been regularly cited, long before Pope’s day, as England’s representative genius. To argue that he had ever been out of favour we must rely on later statements, and they are presumably less trustworthy than those which are contemporary. Lyttelton remarked that a veneration for Shakespeare seems to be a part of the national religion, and the only part in which even men of sense are fanatics;(5) and Gibbon spoke of the “idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare, which is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman.”(6) The present volume will show how the eighteenth century could almost lose itself in panegyric of Shakespeare. The evidence is so overwhelming that it is hard to understand how the century’s respect for Shakespeare was ever doubted. When Tom Jones took Partridge to the gallery of Drury Lane, the play was _Hamlet_. The fashionable topics on which Mr.