_An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespear: with some Letters of Criticism to the SPECTATOR._ 1712, pp. 1, 2. EDWARD YOUNG, 1712 (1683-1765) To claim attention, and the heart invade, Shakespeare but _wrote_ the play th’ Almighty _made_. Our neighbour’s stage art too bare-fac’d betrays, ’Tis great Corneille at every scene we praise; On nature’s surer aid Britannia calls, None think of Shakespeare till the curtain falls; Then with a sigh returns our audience home, From Venice, Egypt, Persia, Greece, or Rome. . . . . . . And yet in Shakespeare something still I find, That makes me less esteem all humankind; He made one nature and another found, Both in his page with master-strokes abound; His witches, fairies, and enchanted isle, Bid us no longer at our nurses smile; Of lost historians we almost complain, Nor think it the creation of his brain. _Epistle to the Right Honourable George, Lord Lansdowne._ 1712, ll. 295-302 and 313-20. JOSEPH ADDISON, 1714 (1672-1719) Our critics do not seem sensible that there is more beauty in the works of a great genius who is ignorant of the rules of art, than in those of a little genius who knows and observes them. It is of these men of genius that Terence speaks in opposition to the little artificial cavillers of his time: _Quorum æmulari exoptat negligentiam Potius quam istorum obscuram diligentiam._ A critic may have the same consolation in the ill success of his play, as Dr. South tells us a physician has at the death of a patient, that he was killed _secundum artem_. Our inimitable Shakespeare is a stumbling-block to the whole tribe of these rigid critics. Who would not rather read one of his plays, where there is not a single rule of the stage observed, than any production of a modern critic, where there is not one of them violated? Shakespeare was indeed born with all the seeds of poetry, and may be compared to the stone in Pyrrhus’s ring, which, as Pliny tells us, had the figure of Apollo and the nine Muses in the veins of it, produced by the spontaneous hand of Nature, without any help from art. _The Spectator_, No. 592, 10 Feb. 1714. ALEXANDER POPE, 1725 (1688-1744) If ever any author deserved the name of an _Original_, it was Shakespeare. Homer himself drew not his art so immediately from the fountains of Nature; it proceeded through Egyptian strainers and channels, and came to him not without some tincture of the learning, or some cast of the models, of those before him. The poetry of Shakespeare was inspiration indeed; he is not so much an imitator as an instrument of Nature: and it is not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks through him.