was never heard, upon topicks which will never arise in the commerce
of mankind. But the dialogue of this authour is often so evidently
determined by the incident which produces it, and is pursued with
so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the
merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection
out of common conversation, and common occurrences.

Upon every other stage the universal agent is love, by whose
power all good and evil is distributed, and every action quickened
or retarded. To bring a lover, a lady and a rival into the fable;
to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with
oppositions of interest, and harrass them with violence of desires
inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in rapture and part
in agony; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous
sorrow; to distress them as nothing human ever was distressed; to
deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered, is the business
of a modern dramatist. For this probability is violated, life is
misrepresented, and language is depraved. But love is only one of
many passions, and as it has no great influence upon the sum of
life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught
his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw
before him. He knew, that any other passion, as it was regular or
exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity.

Characters thus ample and general were not easily discriminated
and preserved, yet perhaps no poet ever kept his personages more
distinct from each other. I will not say with Pope, that every
speech may be assigned to the proper speaker, because many speeches
there are which have nothing characteristical; but, perhaps, though
some may be equally adapted to every person, it will be difficult