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434 stage of their representations. What inspire and sustain their poetic mood are the customs and ideas of their age, the vices and follies of their fellow-citizens above all, nature and the life of man. Comedy therefore springs from the world which surrounds the poet, and she adapts herself fur more closely than tragedy to the external action of reality.

"Not so with Shakespeare. In his time, in England, the material of the drama, Nature and human action, had not yet received from the hands of Art that distinction and classification. When the poet pleased to work this material up for the stage, he took it as a whole with all which was mixed with it, with all the contrasts which were gathered round, and public taste found no fault with such proceeding. The comic, an element of human reality, could manifest itself wherever truth required or would tolerate it, and it was quite in accordance with the character of that English civilisation that even tragedy, with which the comic was to a certain degree associated, lost in nothing the dignity of truth. In such conditions of the stage, and such tastes in the public, what kind of comedy would be likely to manifest itself? How could the latter be considered as a special kind, and bear its settled name as 'Comedy'? It succeeded in doing this by freeing itself from those