From The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, ed. Charles Wells Moulton, 8 vols. (London: Moulton Publishing, 1901), 1: 482.
HENRY VI., PART III
1594-5
From mere inferiority nothing can be inferred; in the productions of wit there will be inequality. Sometimes judgment will err, and sometimes the matter itself will defeat the artist. Of every author's works one will be the best, and one will be the worst.... Dissimilitude of style, and heterogeneousness of sentiment, may sufficiently show that a work does not really belong to the reputed author. But in these plays no such marks of spuriousness are found. The diction, the versification and the figures, are Shakspeare's. -- JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1768, General Observations on Shakspeare's Plays.
Never attracting or affecting me quite as the other works of Shakespeare, nor indeed ever seeming to me to be his works, they had never been so perused as to engage me in spontaneous interpretation or restoration. Even up to the present hour too, of Shakespeare's close, bold, and subtle reasoning; his epigrammatic play of words and ideas, his grace and dignity of dialogue; his psychological curiosity his metaphorical prodigality; his disclosed fruits of pensive experience; his encased kernels of consolidated thought, his touches of human nature, here finely caught, there mysteriously inspired, his world-wide illustration; his magical imagery of outward things reflected from the innermost sense of them, all involved in a stream of melody whose onflow becomes in itself pathetic, -- of these from the three parts of Henry the Sixth I still miss some sensible measure. -- VAUGHAN HENRY HALFORD, 1880, New Readings and New Renderings of Shakespeare's Tragedies, vol. II, p. v.
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