eive and participate in the
social. We have splendid tragedies, we have the most beautiful of poetic
plays, and we have literary comedies passingly pleasant to read, and
occasionally to see acted. By literary comedies, I mean comedies of
classic inspiration, drawn chiefly from Menander and the Greek New Comedy
through Terence; or else comedies of the poet's personal conception, that
have had no model in life, and are humorous exaggerations, happy or
otherwise. These are the comedies of Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Fletcher.
Massinger's Justice Greedy we can all of us refer to a type, 'with fat
capon lined' that has been and will be; and he would be comic, as Panurge
is comic, but only a Rabelais could set him moving with real animation.
Probably Justice Greedy would be comic to the audience of a country booth
and to some of our friends. If we have lost our youthful relish for the
presentation of characters put together to fit a type, we find it hard to
put together the mechanism of a civil smile at his enumeration of his
dishes. Something of the same is to be said of Bobadil, swearing 'by the
foot of Pharaoh'; with a reservation, for he is made to move faster, and
to act. The comic of Jonson is a scholar's excogitation of the comic;
that of Massinger a moralist's.

Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters which are saturated with the
comic spirit; with more of what we will call blood-life than is to be
found anywhere out of Shakespeare; and they are of this world, but they
are of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination, and by great
poetic imagination. They are, as it were--I put it to suit my present
comparison--creatures of the woods and wilds, not in walled towns, not
grouped and toned to pursue a comic exhibition of the narrower world of
society. Jaques, Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop of Clowns,
Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and Fluellen--marvellous Welshmen!--Benedict and
Beatrice, Dogberry, and the rest, are subjects of a special study in the
poetically comic.

His Comedy of incredible imbroglio belongs to the literary section. One
may conceive that there was a natural resemblance between him and
Menander, both in the scheme and style of his lighter plays. Had
Shakespeare lived in a later and less emotional, less heroical period of
our history, he might have turned to the painting of manners as well as
humanity. Euripides would probably, in the time of Menander, when Athens
was enslaved but prosp