pect. No one can dispute that the result of such a
comparison is altogether in favour of Shakespeare;--even the letters of
women of high rank in his age were often coarser than his writings. If he
occasionally disgusts a keen sense of delicacy, he never injures the mind;
he neither excites, nor flatters, passion, in order to degrade the subject
of it; he does not use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carries
on warfare against virtue, by causing wickedness to appear as no
wickedness, through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate.
In Shakespeare vice never walks as in twilight; nothing is purposely out
of its place;--he inverts not the order of nature and propriety,--does not
make every magistrate a drunkard or glutton, nor every poor man meek,
humane, and temperate; he has no benevolent butchers, nor any sentimental
rat-catchers.

4. Independence of the dramatic interest on the plot. The interest in the
plot is always in fact on account of the characters, not _vice versa_, as
in almost all other writers; the plot is a mere canvass and no more. Hence
arises the true justification of the same stratagem being used in regard
to Benedict and Beatrice,--the vanity in each being alike. Take away from
the _Much Ado about Nothing_ all that which is not indispensable to the
plot, either as having little to do with it, or, at best, like Dogberry
and his comrades, forced into the service, when any other less ingeniously
absurd watchmen and night-constables would have answered the mere
necessities of the action;--take away Benedict, Beatrice, Dogberry, and the
reaction of the former on the character of Hero,--and what will remain? In
other writers the main agent of the plot is always the prominent
character; in Shakespeare it is so, or is not so, as the character is in
itself calculated, or not calculated, to form the plot. Don John is the
main-spring of the plot of this play; but he is merely shown and then
withdrawn.

5. Independence of the interest on the story as the ground-work of the
plot. Hence Shakespeare never took the trouble of inventing stories. It
was enough for him to select from those that had been already invented or
recorded such as had one or other, or both, of two recommendations,
namely, suitableness to his particular purpose, and their being parts of
popular tradition,--names of which we had often heard, and of their
fortunes, and as to which all we wanted was, to see the man himself. So