This, Mr. Pope, is a great deal for an Englishman to acknowledge. A veneration for Shakespeare seems to be a part of your national religion, and the only part in which even your men of sense are fanatics.
POPE
He who can read Shakespeare, and be cool enough for all the accuracy of sober criticism, has more of reason than taste.
BOILEAU
I join with you in admiring him as a prodigy of genius, though I find the most shocking absurdities in his plays; absurdities which no critic of my nation can pardon.
POPE
We will be satisfied with your feeling the excellence of his beauties.
Dialogues of the Dead, xiv., 4th edition, 1765. XIV. Boileau—Pope, pp. 125-128.
Three editions of Dialogues of the Dead were published in 1760. Practically the whole of the passage quoted above appeared for the first time in the fourth edition in 1765.