horror than pleasure and mirth;
and if in the conclusion their plots should be baffled, even this would
come too late to prevent that ill impression. But in the Lawsuit this is
admirably avoided: for the character chosen is a rich, avaricious
usurer: the pecuniary distresses of such a person can never be looked
upon with horror; and if he should be even handled unjustly, we always
wait his delivery with patience.

Now with regard to the display of the character, which is the essential
part of the plot, nothing can be more finely imagined than to draw a
miser in law. If you draw him inclined to love and marriage, you depart
from the height of his character in some measure, as Moliere has done.
Expenses of this kind he may easily avoid. If you draw him in law, to
advance brings expense, to draw back brings expense; and the character
is tortured and brought out at every moment.

A sort of notion has prevailed that a comedy might subsist without
humor. It is an idle disquisition, whether a story in private life,
represented in dialogues, may not be carried on with some degree of
merit without humor. It may unquestionably; but what shines chiefly in
comedy, the painting the manners of life, must be in a great measure
wanting. A character which has nothing extravagant, wrong, or singular
in it can affect but very little: and this is what makes Aristotle draw
the great line of distinction between tragedy and comedy. [Greek: En
aute de te diaphora kai e tragodia], &c. Arist. Poet. Ch. II.

* * * * *

There is not a more absurd mistake than that whatever may not
unnaturally happen in an action is of course to be admitted into every
painting of it. In Nature, the great and the little, the serious and the
ludicrous, things the most disproportionate the one to the other, are
frequently huddled together in much confusion, And what then? It is the
business of Art first to choose some determinate end and purpose, and
then to select those parts of Nature, and those only, which conduce to
that end, avoiding with most religious exactness the intermixture of
anything which would contradict it. Else the whole idea of propriety,
that is, the only distinction between the just and chimerical in the
arts, would be utterly lost. An hero eats, drinks, and sleeps, like
other men; but to introduce such scenes on the stage, because they are
natural, would be ridiculous. And why? Because they have nothing to do
wit