Alas! all these good people,
now grown so rusty, fusty, and forgotten, might have rolled under their
tongues, as a sweet morsel, those lines which civil Abraham Cowley sent
to Leviathan Hobbes:--
"To things immortal Time can do no wrong;
And that which never is to die forever must be young."
Alas! they had great first nights and glorious third nights,--lords and
ladies smiled and the groundlings were affable,--they lived in a
paradise of compliment and cash,--and then were no better off than the
garreteer who took his damnation comfortably early upon the first
night, and ran back to his den to whimper with mortification and to
tremble with cold. There is worthy Mr. Shakspeare, of whom an amiable
writer kindly said, in 1723,--"There is certainly a great deal of
entertainment in his comical Humors, and a pleasing and
well-distinguished variety in those characters which he thought fit to
meddle with. His images are indeed everywhere so lively, that the thing
he would represent stands full before you, and you possess every part
of it. His sentiments are great and natural, and his expression just,
and raised in proportion to the subject and occasion." You may laugh at
this as much as you please, Don Bob; but I think it quite as sensible
as many of the criticisms of Samuel Johnson, LL.
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