s and their names, "poor, poor dumb
names," are all that remains of such men as Webster, Deckar, Marston,
Marlow, Chapman, Heywood, Middleton, and Rowley! "How lov'd, how honour'd
once, avails them not:" though they were the friends and fellow-labourers
of Shakspeare, sharing his fame and fortunes with him, the rivals of
Jonson, and the masters of Beaumont and Fletcher's well-sung woes! They
went out one by one unnoticed, like evening lights; or were swallowed up
in the headlong torrent of puritanic zeal which succeeded, and swept away
everything in its unsparing course, throwing up the wrecks of taste and
genius at random, and at long fitful intervals, amidst the painted
gew-gaws and foreign frippery of the reign of Charles II. and from which
we are only now recovering the scattered fragments and broken images to
erect a temple to true Fame! How long, before it will be completed?

If I can do anything to rescue some of these writers from hopeless
obscurity, and to do them right, without prejudice to well-deserved
reputation, I shall have succeeded in what I chiefly propose. I shall not
attempt, indeed, to adjust the spelling, or restore the pointing, as if
the genius of poetry lay hid in errors of the press, but leaving these
weightier matters of criticism to those who are more able and willing to
bear the burden, try to bring out their real beauties to the eager sight,
"draw the curtain of Time, and shew the picture of Genius," restraining my
own admiration within reasonable bounds!...

We affect to wonder at Shakspeare, and one or two more of that period, as
solitary instances upon record; whereas it is our own dearth of
information that makes the waste; for there is no time more populous of
intellect, or more prolific of intellectual wealth, than the one we are
speaking of. Shakspeare did not look upon himself in this light, as a sort
of monster of poetical genius, or on his contemporaries as "less than
smallest dwarfs," when he speaks with true, not false modesty, of himself
and them, and of his wayward thoughts, "desiring this man's art, and that
man's scope." We fancy that there were no such men, that could either add
to or take anything away from him, but such there were. He indeed
overlooks and commands the admiration of posterity, but he does it from
the _tableland_ of the age in which he lived. He towered above his
fellows, "in shape and gesture proudly eminent;" but he was one of a race
of giants, the talles