founded upon system, or what the age termed humours,--by which was
meant factitious and affected characters, superinduced on that which
was common to the rest of their race,--in spite of acute satire, deep
scholarship, and strong sense, do not now afford general pleasure, but
are confined to the closet of the antiquary, whose studies have
assured him that the personages of the dramatist were once, though
they are now no longer, portraits of existing nature.

Let us take another example of our hypothesis from Shakspeare himself,
who, of all authors, drew his portraits for all ages. With the whole
sum of the idolatry which affects us at his name, the mass of readers
peruse, without amusement, the characters formed on the extravagances
of temporary fashion; and the Euphuist Don Armado, the pedant
Holofernes, even Nym and Pistol, are read with little pleasure by the
mass of the public, being portraits of which we cannot recognize the
humour, because the originals no longer exist. In like manner, while
the distresses of Romeo and Juliet continue to interest every bosom,
Mercutio, drawn as an accurate representation of the finished fine
gentleman of the period, and as such received by the unanimous
approbation of contemporaries, has so little to interest the present
age, that, stripped of all his puns, and quirks of verbal wit, he only
retains his place in the scene, in virtue of his fine and fanciful
speech upon dreaming, which belongs to no particular age, and because
he is a personage whose presence is indispensable to the plot.

We have already prosecuted perhaps too far an argument, the tendency
of which is to prove, that the introduction of an humorist, acting
like Sir Piercie Shafton, upon some forgotten and obsolete model of
folly, once fashionable, is rather likely to awaken the disgust of the
reader, as unnatural, than find him food for laughter. Whether owing