Page:The Plays of William Shakspeare (1778).djvu/18

6 eems carcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent election out of common converation, and common occurrences.

Upon every other tage the univeral agent is love, by whoe power all good and evil is ditributed, 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 oppoitions of interet, and harras them with violence of deires inconitent with each other; to make them meet in rapture, and part in agony; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous orrow; to ditres them as nothing human ever was ditreed; to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered, is the buines of a modern dramatit. For this, probability is violated, life is mirepreented, and language is depraved. But love is only one of many paions, and as it has no great influence upon the um 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 aw before him. He knew, that any other paion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a caue of happines or calamity.

Characters thus ample and general were not eaily dicriminated and preerved, yet perhaps no poet ever kept his peronages more ditinct from each other. I will not ay with Pope, that every peech may be aigned to the proper peaker, becaue many peeches there are which have nothing characteritical; but, perhaps, though ome may be equally adapted to every peron, it will be difficult to find any that can be