ouths
with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as nothing
human ever was distressed; to deliver them as nothing human ever was
delivered; is the business of a modern dramatist. For this, probability
is violated, life is misrepresented, and language is depraved. But love
is only one of many passions; and, as it has no great influence upon the
sum of life[3], it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who
caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw
before him. He knew that any other passion, as it was regular or
exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity.

Characters thus ample and general were not easily discriminated and
preserved, yet, perhaps, no poet ever kept his personages more distinct
from each other. I will not say, with Pope, that every speech may be
assigned to the proper speaker, because many speeches there are which
have nothing characteristical; but, perhaps, though some may be equally
adapted to every person, it will be difficult to find any that can be
properly transferred from the present possessor to another claimant. The
choice is right, when there is reason for choice.

Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated
characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the
writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a
dwarf; and he that should form his expectations of human affairs from
the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakespeare has
no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the
reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same
occasion: even where the agency is supernatural, the dialogue is level
with life. Other writers disguise the most natural passions and most
frequent incidents; so that he who contemplates them in the book will
not know them in the world: Shakespeare approximates the remote, and
familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he represents will not
happen, but, if it were possible, its effects would, probably, be such
as he has assigned[4]; and it may be said, that he has not only shown
human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in
trials, to which it cannot be exposed.

This, therefore, is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the
mirror of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the
phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here