the superlative. Just as the writers of light society compliments made envious Venus second to Clorinda or Chloe or Celia, so Shakespeare stood aside to find himself excelled by Addison or Pope or Dryden, or even, on exceptional occasions, by some patron who scarcely did more than pretend to throw off little trifles in verse. Witness the “Lines to Mr. Addison,” by William Somervile: “In heaven he [Shakespeare] sings; on earth your muse supplies Th’ important loss, and heals our weeping eyes.” Or take these lines by John Hughes, “To Mr. Addison on his Tragedy of _Cato_”: “Great Shakespeare’s ghost, the solemn strain to hear (Methinks I see the laurel’d shade appear!), Will hover o’er the scene, and wondering view His favourite Brutus rival’d thus by you.” If one could suppose this to have been written in an ironic vein, the lines would be satisfactorily pointed; but it is impossible, for Hughes continues: “Such Roman greatness in each action shines, Such Roman eloquence adorns your lines, That sure the Sibyl’s books this year foretold, And in some mystic leaf was found inroll’d, Rome, turn thy mournful eyes from Afric’s shore, Nor in her sands thy Cato’s tomb explore! When thrice six hundred times the circling sun His annual race shall through the zodiac run, An isle remote his monument shall rear, And every generous Briton pay a tear.” Or take the following by William Pattison, “To Mr. John Saunders, occasioned by a sight of some of his paintings at Cambridge.” It would be difficult to imagine a more incongruous bracketing of names than that in the sixth line. The italics are my own: “When Nature, from her unexhausted mine, Resolves to make some mighty science shine; Her embryo seeds inform the future birth, Improve the soul, and animate the earth; From thence, an Homer, or Apelles rise, _A Shakespeare, or a Saunders_, strike our eyes, And, lo! the promis’d wonder charms my view, The old Apelles rivall’d in the new!” One might quote pages of such stuff—torrents of heroic couplets—whose very form, apart from their sentiment, show that Shakespeare was deemed rather out of date. But the mention of his name counts for something. It means that all of these poets felt, as Dr. Johnson felt, that though they were not quite in sympathy with the old Elizabethan playwright, he was still some one to be reckoned with. Indeed, every now and then the truth comes out that he was too much for them. William Whitehead, for one, had a full appreciation of him. “O for a Shakespeare’s pencil, while I trace In nature’s breathing paint, the dreary waste Of Buxton” . . . he sighs in _An Hymn to the Nymph of Bristol_; and, for all the bathos of its expression, the admiration is genuine.