the splendor of particular passages, but by the progress
of his fable, and the tenor of his dialogue; and he that tries to
recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in
Heirocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his
pocket as a specimen.

It will not easily be imagined how much Shakespeare excels in
accommodating his sentiments to real life, but by comparing him with other
authors. It was observed of the ancient schools of declamation, that the
more diligently they were frequented, the more was the student
disqualified for the world, because he found nothing there which he should
ever meet in any other place. The same remark may be applied to every
stage but that of Shakespeare. The theatre, when it is under any other
direction, is peopled by such characters as were never seen, conversing in
a language which was never heard, upon topicks which will never arise in
the commerce of mankind. But the dialogue of this author is often so
evidently determined by the incident which produces it, and is pursued
with so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the
merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection out of
common conversation, and common occurrences.

Upon every other stage the universal agent is love, by whose power all
good and evil is distributed, and every action quickened or retarded. To
bring a lover, a lady, and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in
contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions of interest, and
harrass them with violence of desires inconsistent with each other; to
make them meet in rapture, and part in agony; to fill their mouths 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, 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 w