While Flecknoe's pretensions as a dramatist were fairly a subject of derision, Shadwell was eminently popular.

The fact is, he was a member of our society, which naturally gave a friendly bias to our judgments; and his person was universally familiar to the cockneys, which gave him, with the whole London public, a temporary popularity, that his pretensions are not capable of supporting; for opinionum commenta delet dies, naturæ judicia confirmat.

Perhaps the real sang froid I have before noticed, and these pretensions to sensibility, are a natural consequence one or the other.

And this is amply corroborated by my own consciousness of the past I never dared, nor could have dared, to criticize coolly and simply the pretensions of Jesus to be an absolute model of morality, until I had been delivered from the weight of authority and miracle, oppressing my critical powers.

His Pretension to be the Hero of the Drama appears still more in his own Description of his way of Living with his Lady.