“When Nature, from her unexhausted mine,
Resolves to make some mighty science shine;
Her embryo seeds inform the future birth,
Improve the soul, and animate the earth;
From thence, an Homer, or Apelles rise,
A Shakespeare, or a Saunders, strike our eyes,
And, lo! the promis’d wonder charms my view,
The old Apelles rivall’d in the new!”
One might quote pages of such stuff—torrents of heroic couplets—whose very form, apart from their sentiment, show that Shakespeare was deemed rather out of date. But the mention of his name counts for something. It means that all of these poets felt, as Dr. Johnson felt, that though they were not quite in sympathy with the old Elizabethan playwright, he was still some one to be reckoned with. Indeed, every now and then the truth comes out that he was too much for them. William Whitehead, for one, had a full appreciation of him.
“O for a Shakespeare’s pencil, while I trace