piciously and derogatively of the mobile vulgus. And they fail, as nearly every militant classicist does, to recognize the "grand style" in Shakespeare, though, as Mr. More's favorite abomination, Professor Saintsbury truly says, the heretic has but to open the plays anywhere and read fifty lines, and the grand style will smite him in the face, "as God's glory smote Saint Stephen." Mr. More, receding from the position taken in the second series, now admits, indeed, that the greater plays are in their substance "profoundly classic," which is as much as one ever extorts from a defender of the Acropolis; but he clings to his heresy in the case of Romeo and Juliet, ranking its exquisite symphonies of meaning and music below the ethical plain-song of the Hippolytus.
We are interrupting better talk than our own. "Stay, stay," as the German visitor exclaimed on another occasion, "Toctor Shonson is going to say something."
"Sir," cries the Doctor, dashing at "P. E. M." with brutal downrightness, "in your essay on a Bluestocking of the Restoration, you have applied a vile phrase to Congreve. You have done an injustice to Congreve by coupling him with Wycherley and Mrs. Behn as 'wallowing contentedly in nastiness.' A critic should exert himself to distinguish the colors and shades of iniquity. Wycherley splashed through the filth of his time like a gross wit. Mrs. Behn dabbled in it like a prurient and truckling wit. Swift,
