Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
Horace WalpoleShakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.
Horace WalpoleI never found even in my juvenile hours that it was necessary to go a thousand miles in search of themes for moralizing.
Horace Walpole