Rowe's "Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear," reprinted with a very few trifling typographical changes in 1714, survived in all the important eighteenth-century editions, but it was never reprinted in its original form. Pope re-arranged the material, giving it a more orderly structure and omitting passages that were obviously erroneous or that seemed outmoded.[6] It is odd that all later eighteenth-century editors seem to have believed that Pope's revision was actually Rowe's own re-writing of the _Account_ for the 1714 edition. Theobald did not reprint the essay, but he used and amplified Rowe's material in his biography of Shakespeare; Warburton, of course, reprinted Pope's version, as did Johnson, Steevens, and Malone. Both Steevens and Malone identified the Pope revision as Rowe's.[7] Thus it came about that Rowe's preface in its original form was lost from sight during the entire eighteenth century. Even in the twentieth, Pope's revision has been printed with the statement that it is taken "from the second edition (1714), slightly altered from the first edition of 1709."[8] Only D. Nichol Smith has republished the original essay in his _Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare_, 1903. The biographical part of Rowe's _Account_ assembled the few facts and most of the traditions still current about Shakespeare a century after his death. It would be easy for any undergraduate to distinguish fact from legend in Rowe's preface; and scholarship since Steevens and Malone has demonstrated the unreliability of most of the local traditions that Betterton reported from Warwickshire. Antiquarian research has added a vast amount of detail about the world in which Shakespeare lived and has raised and answered questions that never occurred to Rowe; but it has recovered little more of the man himself than Rowe knew. The critical portions of Rowe's account look backward and forward: backward to the Restoration, among whose critical controversies the eighteenth-century Shakespeare took shape; and forward to the long succession of critical writings that, by the end of the century, had secured for Shakespeare his position as the greatest of the English poets. Until Dryden and Rymer, criticism of Shakespeare in the seventeenth century had been occasional rather than systematic. Dryden, by his own acknowledgement, derived his enthusiasm for Shakespeare from Davenant, and thus, in a way, spoke for a man who had known the poet. Shakespeare was constantly in his mind, and the critical problems that the plays raised in the literary milieu of the Restoration constantly fascinated him. Rymer's attack served to solidify opinion and to force Shakespeare's admirers to examine the grounds of their faith. By 1700 a conventional manner of regarding Shakespeare and the plays had been achieved.