play into a comedy! In the prologue to his doctored version of _Troilus and Cressida_, Dryden made the ghost of Shakspere speak of himself as Untaught, unpracticed in a barbarous age. Thomas Rymer, whom Pope pronounced a good critic, was very severe upon Shakspere in his _Remarks on the Tragedies of the Last Age_; and in his _Short View of Tragedy_, 1693, he said, "In the neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff, there is more humanity than, many times, in the tragical flights of Shakspere." "To Deptford by water," writes Pepys, in his diary for August 20, 1666, "reading _Othello, Moor of Venice_; which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but, having so lately read the _Adventures of Five Hours_, it seems a mean thing." In undramatic poetry the new school, both in England and in France, took its point of departure in a reform against the extravagances of the Marinists, or conceited poets, specially represented in England by Donne and Cowley. The new poets, both in their theory and practice, insisted upon correctness, clearness, polish, moderation, and good sense. Boileau's _L'Art Poetique_, 1673, inspired by Horace's _Ars Poetica_, was a treatise in verse upon the rules of correct composition, and it gave the law in criticism for over a century, not only in France, but in Germany and England. It gave English poetry a didactic turn and started the fashion of writing critical essays in riming couplets. The Earl of Mulgrave published two "poems" of this kind, an _Essay on Satire_, and an _Essay on Poetry_. The Earl of Roscommon--who, said Addison, "makes even rules a noble poetry"--made a metrical version of Horace's _Ars Poetica_, and wrote an original _Essay on Translated Verse_. Of the same kind were Addison's epistle to Sacheverel, entitled _An Account of the Greatest English Poets_, and Pope's _Essay on Criticism_, 1711, which was nothing more than versified maxims of rhetoric, put with Pope's usual point and brilliancy. The classicism of the 18th century, it has been said, was a classicism in red heels and a periwig. It was Latin rather than Greek; it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin literature and found its models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius, but in the satires, epistles, and didactic pieces of Juvenal, Horace, and Persius.