The growth of Shakespeare's reputation during the century after his death is a familiar episode in English criticism. Bentley has demonstrated the dominant position of Jonson up to the end of the century.[9] But Jonson's reputation and authority worked for Shakespeare and helped to shape, a critical attitude toward the plays. His official praise in the first Folio had declared Shakespeare at least the equal of the ancients and the very poet of nature. He had raised the issue of Shakespeare's learning, thus helping to emphasize the idea of Shakespeare as a natural genius; and in the _Discoveries_ he had blamed his friend for too great facility and for bombast. In his commendatory sonnet in the Second Folio (1632), Milton took the Jonsonian view of Shakespeare, whose "easy numbers" he contrasted with "slow-endeavouring Art," and readers of the poems of 1645 found in _L'Allegro_ an early formulation of what was to become the stock comparison of the two great Jacobean dramatists in the lines about Jonson's "learned sock" and Shakespeare, "Fancy's child." This contrast became a constant theme in Restoration allusions to the two poets. Two other early critical ideas were to be elaborated in the last four decades of the century. In the first Folio Leonard Digges had spoken of Shakespeare's "fire and fancy," and I.M.S. had written in the Second Folio of his ability to move the passions. Finally, throughout the last half of the century, as Bentley has shown, Shakespeare was admired above all English dramatists for his ability to create characters, of whom Falstaff was the most frequently mentioned. All of these opinions were developed in Dryden's frequent critical remarks on his favorite dramatist. No one was more clearly aware than he of the faults of the "divine Shakespeare" as they appeared in the new era of letters that Dryden himself helped to shape. And no man ever praised Shakespeare more generously. For Dryden Shakespeare was the greatest of original geniuses, who, "taught by none," laid the foundations of English drama; he was a poet of bold imagination, especially gifted in "magick" or the supernatural, the poet of nature, who could dispense with "art," the poet of the passions, of varied characters and moods, the poet of large and comprehensive soul. To him, as to most of his contemporaries, the contrast between Jonson and Shakespeare was important: the one showed what poets ought to do; the other what untutored genius can do. When Dryden praised Shakespeare, his tone became warmer than when he judicially appraised Jonson.