The greater virtues, fortitude, justice, and the like, too serious and sublime.

It is not every story, every character, every incident, but those only which answer their end.—­Painting of artificial things not good; a thing being useful does not therefore make it most pleasing in picture.—­Natural manners, good and bad.—­Sentiment.  In common affairs and common life, virtuous sentiments are not even the character of virtuous men; we cannot bear these sentiments, but when they are pressed out, as it were, by great exigencies, and a certain contention which is above the general style of comedy....

The first character of propriety the Lawsuit possesses in an eminent degree.  The plot of the play is an iniquitous suit; there can be no fitter persons to be concerned in the active part of it than low, necessitous lawyers of bad character, and profligates of desperate fortune.  On the other hand, in the passive part, if an honest and virtuous man had been made the object of their designs, or a weak man of good intentions, every successful step they should take against him ought rather to fill the audience with 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.

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