elights_. "Antony and Cleopatra," v, 2, 88.

P. 49. _His tragedies are better than his comedies._ Hazlitt is here
deliberately opposing the view of Dr. Johnson expressed in the latter's
preface to Shakespeare: "In tragedy he often writes with great appearance
of toil and study, what is written at last with little felicity; but in
his comick scenes, he seems to produce without labour, what no labour can
improve. In tragedy he is always struggling after some occasion to be
comick, but in comedy he seems to repose, or to luxuriate, as in a mode of
thinking congenial to his nature. In his tragick scenes there is always
something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire."
(Nichol Smith's "Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare," p. 121.) In
the second lecture of the "English Comic Writers," Hazlitt recurs to this
opinion of Johnson's with the following comment: "For my own part, I so
far consider this preference given to the comic genius of the poet as
erroneous and unfounded, that I should say that he is the only tragic poet
in the world in the highest sense, as being on a par with, and the same as
Nature, in her greatest heights and depths of action and suffering. There
is but one who durst walk within that mighty circle, treading the utmost
bound of nature and passion, showing us the dread abyss of woe in all its
ghastly shapes and colours, and laying open all the faculties of the human
soul to act, to think, and suffer, in direst extremities; whereas I think,
on the other hand, that in comedy, though his talents there too were as
wonderful as they were delightful, yet that there were some before him,
others on a level with him, and many close behind him.... There is not
only nothing so good (in my judgment) as Hamlet, or Lear, or Othello, or
Macbeth, but there is nothing like Hamlet, or Lear, or Othello, or
Macbeth. There is nothing, I believe, in the majestic Corneille, equal to
the stern pride of Coriolanus, or which gives such an idea of the
crumbling in pieces of the Roman grandeur, 'like an unsubstantial pageant
faded,' as the Antony and Cleopatra. But to match the best serious
comedies, such as Moliere's Misanthrope and his Tartuffe, we must go to
Shakspeare's tragic characters, the Timon of Athens or honest Iago, where
we shall more than succeed. He put his strength into his tragedies and
played with comedy. He was greatest in what was greatest; and his _forte_
was not trifling, according to t