greatly superior to the anonymous essay
on Hamlet of 1752 (_Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare_, xxn).
Lawrence has recently praised a selected passage for its "wise words ...
which may be pondered with profit" (Hamlet and Fortinbras, _PMLA_61
[1946], 697). And Stoll, who has obviously read the book with care, has
found in one of its statements the very "beginning of historical
criticism" (PQ 24 [1945], 291; _Shakespeare Studies_, 212n.), and has
elsewhere seen much to commend in it.

Reasons for such attention are not difficult to find; for the _Remarks_
is both intrinsically and historically an important piece of criticism.
It is still worth reading for more than one passage of discerning
analysis and apt comment on scene, speech, or character, and for certain
not unfruitful excursions into the field of general aesthetics; while
historically it is a sort of landmark in Shakespearian literature.
Standing chronologically almost midway between Dryden and Johnson,
Kames, and Richardson, the _Remarks_ shows decisively the direction in
which criticism, under the steadily mounting pressure of liberal,
empirical thought, is traveling. This little unpretentious book gathers
into itself, either in faint adumbration or in fairly advanced form, the
tendencies in method and ideas that are to remake criticism in the
eighteenth century. There are reflected here the growing distrust of the
"Rules" and the deepening faith in mind as the measure and in
imagination as the instrument. There is also added recognition of the
integrity of effects as a factor in judging literature.

Anonymous is an earlier member of the School of Taste. He is
none-the-less concerned with firm principles by which to justify his
acceptances and rejections. His announced over-all rule is conformity to
"Reason and Nature"--old words that he uses in the newer way. But he is
also handily equipped with a stock of stubbornly conservative
principles, reaching at times the status of bias, that serve to hold his
taste in balance and effectively check unrestrained admiration.

This conservative side of Anonymous must not pass unnoticed, for it is
the part of him that most closely identifies him with his forebears and
so throws his more original, independent side into stronger relief. Our
author is, not unexpectedly, an invariable moralist; is throughout a
stickler for dignity; is sensitive to absurdities, improprieties, and
slips in decorum; will have no truck