In the garden of his house at Hampton, Garrick had a temple dedicated to Shakespeare, and adorned with statuary, of which the chief piece, a fine full-length figure by Roubiliac, is now in the entrance hall of the British Museum. But to do him justice, his efforts, though they carried the manner of the playhouse into private life, were conceived in a spirit of genuine appreciation; and if many of his admirers regarded him almost as the rescuer of Shakespeare from oblivion, he, at any rate, was ready to acknowledge his indebtedness to the dramatist on the presentation of whose characters his well-merited fame rested. So much for the second period.[26:1] Its literature is like a troubled sea of conflicting opinion, through which the ship of Shakespeare’s genius sails, tossed and buffeted by winds fair and foul, from all points of the compass, and emerges triumphant. V THE THIRD PERIOD In the foregoing brief survey I have endeavoured to indicate in the broadest manner possible the principal forces that affected the opinions concerning Shakespeare held during the eighteenth century—the chief boulders, so to say, round which the current of opinion swirled. No such analysis seems necessary in dealing with the nineteenth century. That is, comparatively speaking, smooth water. The poetic reformation inaugurated by Wordsworth and Coleridge, who published their _Lyrical Ballads_ in 1798, practically effaced the classic traditions of the previous hundred years, and prepared a way for the school of æsthetic criticism which set Shakespeare in the place which he now holds. Æsthetic criticism, of a kind, was not entirely unknown. So far back, for instance, as 1736, an anonymous pamphlet appeared with the title, _Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark_. The author is an enthusiastic admirer of “the greatest tragic writer that ever lived (except Sophocles and Euripides),” though most of the beauties which he points out would be obvious to a reader of average intelligence, and his expositions lack insight. Such efforts were, in fact, nothing more than academic recreation, and but for their evidence of a right tendency are hardly worthy of mention. In effect they were, of course, immeasurably distant from the work of the æsthetic critics of the early nineteenth century. Coleridge spoke truly when he thus described his achievement: “However inferior in ability I may be to some who have followed me, I own I am proud that I was the first in time who publicly demonstrated to the full extent of the position, that the supposed irregularity and extravagances of Shakespeare were the mere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it had not the dimensions of the swan.”[28:1] One has but to mention Hazlitt as Coleridge’s co-worker to feel that Shakespeare’s position can never be seriously called in question.