r model, Moliere. He excelled his imitators not
only in his French urbanity--the polished wit and delicate grace of his
style--but in the dexterous unfolding of his plot, and in the wisdom and
truth of his criticism of life, and his insight into character. It is a
symptom of the false taste of the age that Shakspere's plays were
rewritten for the Restoration stage. Davenant made new versions of
_Macbeth_ and _Julius Caesar_, substituting rime for blank verse. In
conjunction with Dryden, he altered the _Tempest_, complicating the
intrigue by the introduction of a male counterpart to Miranda--a youth
who had never seen a woman. Shadwell "improved" _Timon of Athens_, and
Nahum Tate furnished a new fifth act to _King Lear_, which turned the
play into a comedy! In the prologue to his doctored version of _Troilus
and Cressida_, Dryden made the ghost of Shakspere speak of himself as

Untaught, unpracticed in a barbarous age.

Thomas Rymer, whom Pope pronounced a good critic, was very severe upon
Shakspere in his _Remarks on the Tragedies of the Last Age_; and in his
_Short View of Tragedy_, 1693, he said, "In the neighing of a horse or
in the growling of a mastiff, there is more humanity than, many times,
in the tragical flights of Shakspere." "To Deptford by water," writes
Pepys, in his diary for August 20, 1666, "reading _Othello, Moor of
Venice_; which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but,
having so lately read the _Adventures of Five Hours_, it seems a mean
thing."

In undramatic poetry the new school, both in England and in France, took
its point of departure in a reform against the extravagances of the
Marinists, or conceited poets, specially represented in England by Donne
and Cowley. The new poets, both in their theory and practice, insisted
upon correctness, clearness, polish, moderation, and good sense.
Boileau's _L'Art Poetique_, 1673, inspired by Horace's _Ars Poetica_,
was a treatise in verse upon the rules of correct composition, and it
gave the law in criticism for over a century, not only in France, but in
Germany and England. It gave English poetry a didactic turn and started
the fashion of writing critical essays in riming couplets. The Earl of
Mulgrave published two "poems" of this kind, an _Essay on Satire_, and
an _Essay on Poetry_. The Earl of Roscommon--who, said Addison, "makes
even rules a noble poetry"--made a metrical version of Horace's _Ars
Poetica_, and wrote an original _Essay o