t 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 with _Pope_, that every speech may be
assigned to the proper speaker, because many speeches there are which
have nothing characteristical; but perhaps, though some may be equally
adapted to every person, it will be difficult to find any that can be
properly transferred from the present possessor to another claimant.
The choice is right, when there is reason for choice.

Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated
characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the
writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a
dwarf; and he that should form his expectations of human affairs from
the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. _Shakespeare_
has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak
as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on
the same occasion: Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue
is level with life. Other writers disguise the most natural passions
and most frequent incidents; so that he who contemplates them in the
book will not know them in the world: _Shakespeare_ approximates the
remote, and familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he repre