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By Root 20844 0

show, Richardson's work has a moral purpose. His intention, as he tells us, was to make poetry subservient to philosophy, and to employ it in tracing the principles of human conduct. Accordingly, he has prejudiced his claims as a literary critic. He is not interested in Shakespeare's art for its own sake; but that he should use Shakespeare's characters as the subjects of moral disquisitions is eloquent testimony to their truth to nature. His classical bias, excusable in a Professor of Latin, is best seen in his essay “On the Faults of Shakespeare,” of which the title was alone sufficient to win him the contempt of later critics. His essays are the dull effusions of a clever man. Though they are not inspiriting, they are not without interest. He recognised that the source of Shakespeare's greatness is that he became for the time the person whom he represented.

[pg xxxvi]

Before the appearance of Richardson's Philosophical Analysis, Thomas Whately had written his Remarks on Some of the Characters of Shakespeare; but it was not published till 1785. The author, who died in 1772, had abandoned it in order to complete, in 1770, his Observations on Modern Gardening. The book contains only a short introduction and a comparison of Macbeth and Richard III. The fragment is sufficient, however, to indicate more clearly than the work of Richardson the coming change. The author has himself remarked on the novelty of his method. The passage must be quoted, as it is the first definite statement that the examination of Shakespeare's characters should be the main object of Shakespearian criticism:

“The writers upon dramatic composition have, for the most part, confined their observations to the fable; and the maxims received amongst them, for the conduct of it, are therefore emphatically called, The Rules of the Drama. It has been found easy to give and to apply them; they are obvious, they are certain, they are general: and poets without genius have, by observing them, pretended to fame; while critics without discernment have assumed importance from knowing them. But the regularity thereby established, though highly proper, is by no means the first requisite in a dramatic composition. Even waiving all consideration of those finer feelings which a poet's imagination or sensibility imparts, there is, within the colder provinces of judgment and of knowledge, a subject for criticism more worthy of attention than the common topics of discussion: I mean the distinction and preservation of character.”

The earlier critics who remarked on Shakespeare's depiction of character had not suspected that the examination of it was to oust the older methods.

[pg xxxvii]

A greater writer, who has met with unaccountable neglect, was to express the same views independently. Maurice Morgann had apparently written his Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff about 1774, in an interval of political employment, but he was not prevailed upon to publish it till 1777. The better we know it, the more we shall regret that it is the only critical work which he allowed to survive. He too refers to his book as a “novelty.” He believes the task of considering Shakespeare in detail to have been “hitherto unattempted.” But his main object, unlike Whately's or Richardson's, is a “critique on the genius, the arts, and the conduct of Shakespeare.” He concentrates his attention on a single character, only to advance to more general criticism. “Falstaff is the word only, Shakespeare is the theme.”

Morgann's book did not meet with the attention which it deserved, nor to this day has its importance been fully recognised. Despite his warnings, his contemporaries regarded it simply as a defence of Falstaff's courage. One spoke of him as a paradoxical critic, and others doubted if he meant what he said. All were unaccountably indifferent to his main purpose. The book was unknown even to Hazlitt, who in the preface to his Characters of Shakespeare's Plays alludes only to Whately and Richardson as his English predecessors. Yet it is the true forerunner of the romantic