ist of his finer passages. Gildon was a man whose ideas took their
colour from his surroundings. In the days of his acquaintanceship with
Dryden he appreciated Shakespeare more heartily than when he was left to
the friendship of Dennis or the favours of the Duke of Buckinghamshire.
His _Art of Poetry_ is a dishonest compilation, which owes what value it
has to the sprinkling of contemporary allusions. It even incorporates,
without any acknowledgment, long passages from Sidney's _Apologie_. We
should be tempted to believe that Gildon merely put his name to a
hack-work collection, were it not that there is a gradual deterioration in
his criticism.

John Dennis also replied to Rymer's _Short View_, and was classed
afterwards as one of Rymer's disciples. In his _Impartial Critick_ (1693)
he endeavoured to show that the methods of the ancient Greek tragedy were
not all suitable to the modern English theatre. To introduce a chorus, as
Rymer had recommended, or to expel love from the stage, would, he argued,
only ruin the English drama. But his belief in the classical rules made
him turn the _Merry Wives_ into the _Comical Gallant_. As he found in the
original three actions, each independent of the other, he had set himself
to make the whole "depend on one common centre." In the Dedication to the
letters _On the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare_ we read that
Aristotle, "who may be call'd the Legislator of Parnassus, wrote the laws
of tragedy so exactly and so truly in reason and nature that succeeding
criticks have writ justly and reasonably upon that art no farther than
they have adhered to their great master's notions." But at the very
beginning of the letters themselves he says that "Shakespeare was one of
the greatest geniuses that the world e'er saw." Notwithstanding his
pronounced classical taste, his sense of the greatness of Shakespeare is
as strong as Rowe's, and much stronger than Gildon's. His writings prove
him a man of competent scholarship, who had thought out his literary
doctrines for himself, and could admire beauty in other than classical
garb. The result is that at many points his opinions are at marked
variance with those of Rymer, for whom, however, he had much respect.
Rymer, for instance, had said that Shakespeare's genius lay in comedy, but
the main contention of Dennis's letters is that he had an unequalled gift
for tragedy. As a critic Dennis is greatly superior to Rymer and his
disciples. The ancien