y, that he has made
Dryden's bill good money by accepting it. Pope, in the precise and
critical sense in which he has attached the praise of "variety" to
Shakspeare, would certainly not have communicated the praise, with him, to
Fletcher.

Shakspeare, says Dryden, "drew the images of Nature, _not laboriously_,
but luckily." "All along," says Pope, "there is seen _no labour_, no pains
to raise the passions, no preparation to lead towards the effect; but the
heart swells, and the tears burst out, just at the proper places." The
unstudied, spontaneous movement of the scene, in Shakspeare, both of the
Action and of the Passion, as if every thing went on of its own impulse,
and not as willed and ruled by the poet, is an imitation of Nature which
no other dramatist has so closely urged. Pope insists upon it--for the
passion, at least. Is this characteristic already contained in the "not
laboriously, but luckily," of Dryden? If it is contained, it is hardly
conveyed. A seed has dropped from the hand of Dryden. Under the gardening
of Pope, it springs up into a fair and fairly-spread plant. That is a sort
of "diffusion" very distinct from turning gold into base metal. So Pope of
himself admires that, in the comedies, histories, and tragedies of the
unversed Shakspeare, all the businesses, high and low, of human life, turn
upon their own hinges.--If a statesman counsel, he lays down the very
grounds of proceeding which greyheaded statesmanship would have
propounded--a king reigns like a king, a soldier fights like a soldier,
woman loves and hates like a woman, a clown is a clown, a thief is a
thief. In short, besides the individual constitution and self-consistency
of the CHARACTERS, besides the spontaneous and self-timed motion of the
PASSIONS, we are further and distinctly to admire this--that the springs,
the constitution, and the government of ACTION are imitated;--as if the
inexperienced player from Avon side had stood personally, confidentially,
participatingly present in the heart of all human transactions: And if it
appears to the acute critic wonderful that Shakspeare should have found,
in his own bosom, the archetypes of so many and so diverse
individualities, that he should have found there the law given by original
Nature for the flow and current, the impulsion, the meandering, and the
precipitation of the _passions_; it strikes him as yet more wonderful,
more like an inspiring, that he should have found there a divina