_Caesar did never wrong_, etc. Cf. _Julius Caesar_, iii. 1. 47, 48, when
the lines read:
Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied.
23. Gerard Langbaine in his _Account of the English Dramatick Poets_
(1691) ascribes to Shakespeare “about forty-six plays, all which except
three are bound in one volume in Fol., printed London, 1685” (p. 454). The
three plays not printed in the fourth folio are the _Birth of Merlin, or
the Child has lost his Father_, a tragi-comedy, said by Langbaine to be by
Shakespeare and Rowley; _John King of England his troublesome Reign_; and
the _Death of King John at Swinstead Abbey_. Langbaine thinks that the
last two “were first writ by our Author, and afterwards revised and
reduced into one Play by him: that in the Folio being far the better.” He
mentions also the _Arraignment of Paris_, but does not ascribe it to
Shakespeare, as he has not seen it.
_a late collection of poems_,—_Poems on Affairs of State, from the year
1620 to the year 1707_, vol. iv.
_Natura sublimis_, etc. Horace, _Epistles_, ii. 1. 165.
The concluding paragraph is omitted by Pope.
John Dennis.
24. _Shakespear ... Tragick Stage._ Contrast Rymer’s _Short View_, p. 156:
“Shakespear’s genius lay for Comedy and Humour. In Tragedy he appears
quite out of his element.” Cf. Dennis’s later statement, p. 40.
25. _the very Original of our English Tragical Harmony._ Cf. Dryden,
Epistle Dedicatory of the _Rival Ladies_, ed. W. P. Ker, i., p. 6, and
Bysshe, _Art of English Poetry_, 1702, p. 36. See Johnson’s criticism of
this passage, Preface, p. 140.
_Such verse we make_, etc. Dennis makes these two lines illustrate
themselves.
26. _Jack-Pudding._ See the _Spectator_, No. 47. The term was very common
at this time for a “merry wag.” It had also the more special sense of “one
attending on a mountebank,” as in Etherege’s _Comical Revenge_, iii. 4.
_Coriolanus._ Contrast Dennis’s opinion of _Coriolanus_ in his letter to
Steele of 26th March, 1719: “Mr. Dryden has more than once declared to me
that there was something in this very tragedy of _Coriolanus_, as it was
writ by Shakespear, that is truly great and truly Roman; and I more than
once answered him that it had always been my own opinion.”
29. _Poetical Justice._ Dennis defended the doctrine of poetical justice
in the first of the two additional letters published with the letters on
Shakespeare. Addison had examined this “ridiculous doctrine in modern
criticism” in the _Spectator_, No. 40 (April 16, 1711). Cf. Pope’s account
of Dennis’s “deplorable frenzy” in the _Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris_
(Pope’s _Works_, ed. Elwin and Courthope, x. 459).