It is difficult in the face of these pros and cons to determine what Johnson’s attitude towards Shakespeare really was. Much of his apparent hostility may, perhaps, be attributed to his instinctive argumentativeness. It was his nature to object. If he were in a loquacious mood, you had but to make a bald statement, and he was upon you with an aggressively persuasive “Why, sir!” And here it may be that he felt irresistibly impelled to combat the universal opinion of Shakespeare’s greatness, and that he was hardly sincere in all he wrote. However this may be, it is probable that he left on his readers the impression that the balance of his inclination was against rather than for Shakespeare. The very fact of the judicial attitude would tend to produce such an impression. A judicial attitude towards Shakespeare was not at that period so well understood as to be readily distinguished from unfriendliness. And in estimating the critical attitude of the age towards Shakespeare, it is necessary to bear in mind that Dr. Johnson was a more important person when he lived than he is now. Nothing is gained by speculating what he might have thought. The fact remains that what he wrote carried weight. Johnson’s opinion was not, however, sufficiently weighty to make his preface, as he intended it to be, the last word in Shakespearean criticism. Other editors followed him. Edward Capell brought much serious and laborious scholarship to the task; and his judgments were frequently sound, though his lack of perspicuity in delivering them detracts somewhat from their value. His edition appeared in 1768. Five years later, in 1773, George Steevens revised Johnson’s edition, and, bringing to the enterprise an unrivalled knowledge of Elizabethan history and literature, embodied many improvements, which he treated with a humour that was frequently malicious and occasionally obscene. To the second edition (1778) of this work was added much valuable material relating to Shakespeare’s biography and the sources of his plots, due to the researches of Edmund Malone, who published an edition of his own in 1790. The well-known “First Variorum” edition appeared in twenty-one volumes in 1803, prepared by Isaac Reed from a 1793 copy of Steevens’, containing many manuscript notes. The “Second Variorum” appeared in 1813; and the “Third Variorum,” arranged by James Boswell, the son of Johnson’s biographer, which appeared in 1821, marks the close of what may be called the eighteenth century period of commentators.