ts guided his taste without blinding him to modern
excellence.

Even Lewis Theobald, whom some would consider Shakespeare's greatest
friend in this century, believed in the rules. He complied with the taste
of the town when he wrote pantomimes, but he was a sterner man when he
posed as a critic. He would then speak of the "general absurdities of
Shakespeare," and the "errors" in the structure of his plays. He passed
this criticism both in his edition of Shakespeare and in the early
articles in the _Censor_ on _King Lear_, which are also of considerable
historical interest as being the first essays devoted exclusively to an
examination of a single Shakespearian play. His complacent belief in the
rules prompted him to correct _Richard II._ "The many scattered beauties
which I have long admired," he says naively in the Preface, "induced me to
think they would have stronger charms if they were interwoven in a regular
Fable." No less confident is a note on _Love's Labours Lost_: "Besides the
exact regularity of the rules of art, which the author has happened to
preserve in some few of his pieces, this is demonstration, I think, that
though he has more frequently transgressed the unity of Time by cramming
years into the compass of a play, yet he knew the absurdity of so doing,
and was not unacquainted with the rule to the contrary."(10) Theobald was
a critic of the same type as Gildon. Each had profound respect for what he
took to be the accredited doctrines. If on certain points Theobald's ideas
were liable to change, the explanation is that he was amenable to the
opinions of others. We do not find in Theobald's criticism the courage of
originality.

There is little about the rules in Pope's Preface. That Pope respected
them cannot be doubted, else he would not have spoken so well of Rymer,
and in the critical notes added to his Homer we should not hear so much of
Le Bossu's treatise on the Epic.(11) But Pope was a discreet man, who knew
when to be silent. He regarded it as a misfortune that Shakespeare was not
so circumstanced as to be able to write on the model of the ancients, but,
unlike the pedant theorists, he refused to judge Shakespeare by the rules
of a foreign drama. Much the same is to be said of Addison. His belief in
the rules appears in his _Cato_. His over-rated criticism of _Paradise
Lost_ is little more than a laboured application of the system of Le
Bossu. But in the _Spectator_ he too urges that Shakespear