law of Moses?  All his propensities are mingled with each other, so that, in trying to apportion to each its proper part, we find the same difficulty which constantly meets us in real life.  A superficial critic may say that hatred is Shylock’s ruling passion.  But how many passions have amalgamated to form that hatred?  It is partly the result of wounded pride:  Antonio has called him dog.  It is partly the result of covetousness:  Antonio has hindered him of half a million; and when Antonio is gone, there will be no limit to the gains of usury.  It is partly the result of national and religious feeling:  Antonio has spit on the Jewish gaberdine; and the oath of revenge has been sworn by the Jewish Sabbath.  We might go through all the characters which we have mentioned, and through fifty more in the same way; for it is the constant manner of Shakspeare to Page xlix

represent the human mind as lying, not under the absolute dominion of one despotic propensity, but under a mixed government in which a hundred powers balance each other.  Admirable as he was in all parts of his art, we most admire him for this, that while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists Put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature.

Shakspeare has had neither equal nor second.  But among the writers who, in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud.  She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, common-place, all such as we meet every day. yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings.  There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom—­Mr. Edward Ferrers, Mr. Henry Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton.  They are all specimens of the upper part of the middle class.  They have been liberally educated.  They all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession.  They are all young.  They are all in love.  Not one of them has any hobbyhorse, to use the phrase of Sterne.  Not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope.  Who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other?  No such thing.  Harpagon is not more unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike to Sir Lucius O’Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen’s young divines to all his reverend -brethren.  And almost all this is done by touches so delicate that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed.

A line must be drawn, we conceive, between artists of this class -and those poets and novelists whose skill lies in the exhibiting of what Ben Jonson called humours.  The words of Ben are so much to the purpose that we will quote them :-