Particular ranks and professions of men have likewise characteristical peculiarities which are capable of being placed in a ludicrous view; and Comedy has made frequent use of this source of ridicule. In exposing professional, as well as national absurdities, great illiberality and unfairness have been shewn; both, probably, from the same cause; a want of sufficient acquaintance with the whole characters, and taking a judgment of them from a few external circumstances. Yet, upon the whole, good effects may have arisen even from this branch of Comedy; since, by attacking a profession on a side where it was really weak, the members of it have been made sensible of, and have reformed those circumstances which rendered them ridiculous. A good-natured physician can never be angry at Moliere’s most laughable exhibitions of the faculty, when he reflects that the follies ridiculed, though exaggerated in the representation, had a real existence; and, by being held up to public derision, have been in a great measure reformed. The professors of law, being necessarily confined to forms and rules, have not been able to benefit so much from the comic ridicule of which they have enjoyed an equally plentiful share. Besides the arrangements which nation and profession make of mankind, there are certain natural classes formed from the diversities of personal character. Although the varieties of temper and disposition in men are infinite, so that no two persons probably ever existed in whom there was an exact conformity, yet there are certain leading features of character which produce a general resemblance among numerous individuals. Thus the proud man, the vain, the sanguine, the splenetic, the suspicious, the covetous, the lavish, and so forth, are a sort of abstract characters which divide the whole human race amongst them. Now there are, belonging to all these, objects of ridicule which it has been the business of Comedy to exhibit; and though, perhaps, no one individual of each class perfectly resembled the person held to view on the stage, yet if all the circumstances exhibited are contained in the general character, it appears sufficiently natural. The _Miser_ of Moliere is not a picture of any one miser who ever lived, but of a miser considered as forming a class of human characters. As these general classes, however, are few in number, they must be soon exhausted by the writers of Comedy, who have been obliged, for the sake of variety, to exhibit those peculiarities which are more rare and singular. Hence have been derived many pictures of that character which we call an _humourist_; by which is meant a character distinguished by certain ludicrous singularities from the rest of mankind. The humourist is not without those marks of distinction which he may acquire, like others, from rank, profession, or temper of mind; but all these are displayed in him after a manner peculiarly his own, and dashed with his leading oddities.