athetic, not our
selfish emotions, that they interest us: we are far more inclined to
laugh with them than at them; and even when we laugh at them we love
them the more for that which is laughable in them. So that our
intercourse with them proceeds under the great law of kindness and
charity. Try this with any of the Poet's illustrious groups of comic
personages, and it will be found, I apprehend, thoroughly true. What
distinguishes us from them, or sets us above them in our own esteem,
is never appealed to as a source or element of delectation. And so the
pleasure we have of them is altogether social in its nature, and
humanizing in its effect, ever knitting more widely the bands of
sympathy.

Here we have what may be called a foreground of comedy, but the Poet's
humour keeps up a living circulation between this and the serious
elements of our being that stand behind it. It is true, we are not
always, nor perhaps often, conscious of any stirring in these latter:
what is laughable occupies the surface, and therefore is all that we
directly see. But still there are deep undercurrents of earnest
sentiment moving not the less really that their movement is noiseless.
In the disguise of sport and mirth, there is a secret discipline of
humanity going on; and the effect is all the better that it steals
into us unseen and unsuspected: we know that we laugh, but we do
something better than laughing without knowing it, and so are made
the better by our laughter; for in that which betters us without our
knowledge we are doubly benefited.

Not indeed but that Shakespeare has characters, as, for example, the
Steward in _King Lear_, which are thoroughly contemptible, and which
we follow with contempt. But it is to be observed that there is
nothing laughable in Oswald; nothing that we can either laugh with or
laugh at: he is a sort of human reptile, such as life sometimes
produces, whom we regard with moral loathing and disgust, but in whose
company neither mirth nor pity can find any foothold. On the other
hand, the feelings moved by a Bottom, a Dogberry, an Aguecheek, or a
Slender, are indeed very different from those which wait upon a
Cordelia, an Ophelia, or an Imogen, but there is no essential
oppugnance between them: in both cases the heart moves by the laws of
sympathy; which is exactly reversed in the case of such an object as
Oswald: the former all touch us through what we have in common with
them; the latter touches us on