Jonson possessed all the learning which was wanting to Shakespeare, and wanted all the genius of which the other was possessed. Both of them were equally deficient in taste and elegance, in harmony and correctness. A servile copyist of the ancients, Jonson translated into bad English the beautiful passages of the Greek and Roman authors, without accommodating to the manners of his age and country. His merit has been totally eclipsed by that of Shakespeare, whose rude genius prevailed over the rude art of his contemporary. The English theatre has ever since taken a strong tincture of Shakespeare’s spirit and character; and thence it has proceeded, that the nation has undergone from all its neighbours the reproach of barbarism, from which its valuable productions in some parts of learning would otherwise have exempted it.
Appendix to the Reign of James I. History of England from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the Revolution in 1688. 1754.
HORACE WALPOLE, EARL OF ORFORD, 1756
(1717-1797)
John and I are just going to Garrick’s with a grove of cypresses in our hands, like the Kentish men at the Conquest. He has built a temple to his master Shakespeare, and I am going to adorn the outside, since his modesty would not let me decorate it within, as I proposed, with these mottoes:
Quod spiro et placeo, si placeo, tuum est.
That I spirit have and nature,
That sense breathes in ev’ry feature,
That I please, if please I do,—
Shakespeare,—all I owe to you.