The evidence of commonplacing confirms that, by the end of our period, Shakespeare stood head-and-shoulders above all other writers in readers' esteem. Other authors, however, also experienced popular appropriation to varying degrees, as the reading public added meaningful substance to the critics' progressive outlining of an English literary canon. Most of these writers, of course, in an age of expanding and more diverse authorship, were of rather more recent vintage than the greatest of the late Tudor playwrights: indeed it was intrinsic to canonisation, as advocates like the Wartons insisted, that it should connect the past high points of English literary endeavour with the paramount practitioners of the present. As with Shakespeare, moreover, there are a number of interesting questions to be answered about the role of commonplacing in encouraging certain styles of writing, and not least specific types of poetic text, to be widely embraced by ordinary readers. For example, to return to a point raised in Chapter 10, how far was the popularity of the heroic couplet in eighteenth-century poetry a consequence of the fact that, in yielding easily identifiable and free-standing subdivisions for convenient extraction, this particular form was actually so well adapted to commonplacing's strongly epigrammatic preferences?