the powers of so eminently tragic a poet? Was it this circumstance which led Johnson to give this singular opin- ion: ‘“‘ Shakspeare’s tragedy seems to be skill ; his comedy to be instinct ?”
Assuredly, nothing can be more whimsical than to re- fuse to Shakspeare the instinct ‘of tragedy ; and if Johnson had had any feeling of it himself, such an idea would never have entered his mind. The fact which I have just stated, however, is not open to doubt; it is well deserving of explanation, and has its causes in the very nature of comedy, as it was understood and treated by Shakspeare.
Shakspeare’s comedy is not, in fact, the comedy of Mo- ii€re ; nor is it that of Aristophanes, or of the Latin poets. Among the Greeks, and in France, in modern times, com- edy was the offspring of a free but attentive observation of the real world, and its object was to bring its features on the stage. The distinction between the tragic and the comic styles is met with almost in the cradle of dramatic art, and their separation has always become more dis- tinctly-marked during the course of their progress. The principle of this distinction is contained in the very nature of things. The destiny and nature of man, his passions and affairs, characters and évents—all things within and around us—bhave their serious and their amusing sides, and may be considered and described under either of these points of view. This two-fold aspect of man and the world has opened to dramatic poetry two careers naturally dis- tinct ; but in dividing its powers to traverse them both, art has neither separated itself from realities, nor ceased to observe and reproduce them. Whether Aristophanes attacks, with the most fantastic liberty of imagination, the vices or follies of the Athenians; or whether Moliére de. picts the absurdities of credulity and avarice, of jealousy
