As early as 1804 Scott referred to _The Changeling_ as "an old play which contains some passages horribly striking,"[148] and in so doing voiced, as Mr. Swinburne says, "the first word of modern tribute to the tragic genius of Thomas Middleton."[149] Scott also praised Massinger highly, especially for his strength in characterization, and once called him "the most gentleman-like of all the old English dramatists."[150] He discussed Beaumont and Fletcher sympathetically, for he knew them well and frequently quoted from them. He named Shirley, Ford, Webster, and Dekker in a group, and spoke of the singular profusion of talents devoted in this period to the writing of plays, an observation which is made more explicitly later in the _Journal_, when he has just been reading an old play which, he says, "worthless in the extreme, is, like many of the plays in the beginning of the seventeenth century, written to a good tune. The dramatic poets of that time seem to have possessed as joint-stock a highly poetical and abstract tone of language, so that the worst of them often remind you of the very best."[151] This circumstance he accounts for by a reference to the audiences, and this in turn he seems to ascribe partly to the great number of theaters then open in London. He dwells so much on the evils of limiting the number of play-houses to two or three, that we may fairly consider it one of his hobbies, and it is possible that he had some slight influence toward increasing that public opposition to the theatrical monopoly which finally, in 1843, resulted in the nullification of the patents.