“Shakespeare,” says Victor Hugo, “once dead entered into oblivion. Under the Restoration he ‘completed his eclipse.’ He was so thoroughly dead that Davenant, possibly his son, recomposed his pieces. There was no longer any _Macbeth_ but the _Macbeth_ of Davenant. Dryden speaks of Shakespeare on one occasion in order to say that he is ‘out of date.’ Lord Shaftesbury calls him ‘a wit out of fashion’ . . . “These two men having condemned Shakespeare, the oracle had spoken. England, a country more obedient to conventional opinion than is generally believed, forgot Shakespeare. Some purchaser pulled down his house, New Place. A Rev. Dr. Gastrell cut down and burnt his mulberry-tree.[10:1] At the commencement of the eighteenth century the eclipse was total. In 1707 one called Nahum Tate published a _King Lear_, warning his readers ‘that he had borrowed the idea of it from a play which he had read by chance, the work of some nameless author.’ This ‘nameless author’ was Shakespeare.” Now the numerous adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays which appeared after the Restoration have been taken somewhat paradoxically as indicative of his decline in the public estimation. Such a deduction is by no means accurate. If we take into consideration the comparatively low level to which imaginative literature had fallen under the influence of Charles II.’s Court, the wonder is perhaps that the theatre-going public should have received Shakespeare in any form. Such neglect of Shakespeare as is seen at this time is attributable merely to change of fashion in popular literature, and that was then, and still is, as mutable as the sea. Popular literature does not live, and the adaptations of the later Stuart reigns are now known only to curious students. But Shakespeare lived through it all, known and appreciated by all who had souls above the vulgar; and in this very period he passed triumphantly his first examination at the hands of a skilled critic, John Dryden. Dryden was in every respect typical of the cultivated class of his period. His early judgment of Shakespeare was formed in the somewhat flickering light of Restoration taste. His final estimate was that of a matured thinker. Certainly, adaptations prepared to suit the fickle taste of the playgoer of the period cannot be said to reflect the true character of Shakespeare’s reputation. We see the same thing at the present day. The altruism of theatrical managers is compelled to make concessions to popular demands. The public are still rather shy of going to see Shakespeare simply as Shakespeare. They appear to feel that going to see a play of Shakespeare is like sacrificing themselves for their own good. So the managers who gild the pill for them are successful, and those who do not merely fail, or at best earn a precarious livelihood. One might as well say that Shakespeare’s reputation is at a very low ebb to-day, as make the