to draw a particular face, he gives the very lineaments he finds in it; yet so far resembling to what he observes of the same turn in other faces, as not to affect any minute circumstance of peculiarity. But if the same artist were to design a head in general, he would assemble together all the customary traits and features, any where observable through the species, which should best express the idea, whatever it was, he had conceived in his own mind and wanted to exhibit in the picture.

There is much the same difference between the two sorts of dramatic portraits. Whence it appears that in calling the tragic character particular, I suppose it only less representative of the kind than the comic; not that the draught of so much character as it is concerned to represent should not be general: the contrary of which I have asserted and explained at large elsewhere [Notes on the A. P. v. 317.]

Next, I have said, the characters of just comedy are general. And this I explain by the instance of the Avare of Moliere, which conforms more to the idea of avarice, than to that of the real avaricious man. But here again, the reader will not understand me, as saying this in the strict sense of the words. I

even think Moliere faulty in the instance given; though, with some necessary explanation, it may well enough serve to express my meaning.

The view of the comic scene being to delineate characters, this end, I suppose, will be attained most perfectly, by making those characters as universal as possible. For thus the person shewn in the drama being the representative of all characters of the same kind, furnishes in the highest degree the entertainment of humour. But then this universality must be such as agrees not to our idea of the possible effects of the character as conceived in the abstract, but to the actual exertion of its powers; which experience justifies, and common life allows. Moliere, and before him Plautus, had offended in this; that for a picture of the avaricious man, they presented us with a fantastic unpleasing draught of the passion of avarice. I call this a fantastic draught, because it hath no archetype in nature. And it is, farther, an unpleasing one, for, being the delineation of a simple passion unmixed, it wanted all those

-Lights and shades, whose well-accorded strife

Gives all the strength and colour of our life.

These lights and shades (as the poet finely calls the intermixture of many passions, which, with the leading or principal one, form the human character) must be blended together in every picture of dramatic manners; because the avowed business of the drama is to image real life. Yet the draught of the leading passion must be as general as this strife in nature permits, in order to express the intended character more perfectly.

All which again is easily illustrated in the instance of painting. In portraits of character, as we may call those that give a picture of the manners, the artist, if he be of real ability, will not go to work on the possibility of an abstract idea. All he intends, is to shew that some one quality predominates: and this he images strongly, and by such signatures as are most conspicuous in the operation of the leading passion. And when he hath done this, we may, in common speech or in compliment, if we please, to his art, say of such a portrait that it images to us not the man but the passion; just as the ancients observed of the famous statue of Apollodorus by Silarion, that it expressed not the angry Apollodorus, but his passion of angerf. But by this must

* Non hominem ex ære fecit, sed iracundiam. Plin, xxxiv. 8.

be understood only that he has well expressed the leading parts of the designed character. For the rest he treats his subject as he would any other; that is, he represents the concomitant affections, or considers merely that general symmetry and proportion which are expected in a human figure. And this is to copy nature, which affords no specimen of a man turned all into a single passion. No metamorphosis could be more strange or incredible. Yet portraits of this vicious taste are the admiration of common starers, who, if they find a picture of a miser for instance (as there is no commoner subject of moral portraits) in a collection, where every muscle is strained, and feature hardened into the expression of this idea, never fail to profess their wonder and. approbation of it.-On this idea of excellence Le Brun's book of the PASSIONS must be said to contain a set of the justest moral portraits: And the CHARACTERS of Theophrastus might be recommended, in a dramatic view, as preferable to those of Terence.

The virtuosi in the fine arts would certainly laugh at the former of these judgments. But the latter, I suspect, will not be thought so extraordinary. At least if one may guess from the practice of some of our best comic writers,

and the success which such plays have commonly met with. It were easy to instance in almost all plays of character. But if the reader would see the extravagance of building dramatic manners on abstract ideas, in its full light, he needs only turn to B. Jonson's Every man out of his humour; which under the name of a play of character is in fact, an unnatural, and, as the painters call it, hard delineation of a group of simply existing passions, wholly chimerical, and unlike to any thing we observe in the commerce of real life. Yet this comedy has always had its admirers. And Randolph, in particular, was so taken with the design, that he seems to have formed his muse's looking-glass in express imitation of it.

Shakespeare, we may observe, is in this as in all the other more essential beauties of the

drama, a perfect model. If the discerning reader peruse attentively his comedies with this view, he will find his best-marked characters discoursing through a great deal of their parts, just like any other, and only expressing their essential and leading qualities occasionally, and as circumstances concur to give an easy exposition to them. This singular excellence of his comedy, was the effect of his copying