preference for Shakespeare to Jonson, we shall see that Butler has no hesitation in asserting the superiority of Jonson to Shakespeare as an obvious thing; nor could it well be otherwise in so essentially prosaic an age. This implies the triumph of the comedy of types over the comedy of nature. Jonson, like Menander, impersonates particular characteristics, or situations in life; Shakespeare paints human nature as large as it really is. We have seen how the exhibition of these so-called 'humours' forms the staple of the comedy of Shadwell. The handling of Congreve and his associates, who had the example of Molière before them, is far superior, but the principle is at bottom the same. A characteristic is incarnated in a personage, and often indicated by his very name. Instead of the names bestowed by fancy, or borrowed from romance, the Benedicts, Rosalinds, Imogens, Mirandas, we have Witwoulds, Maskwells, Millamants, and Gibbets. Each character being thus more or less conventional, the _tout ensemble_ is necessarily conventional too; and to this extent the world of these dramatists may be fairly regarded as ideal; while it is not true that they had any definite purpose of creating such a world, or that it was so dissimilar to actual society as to interfere with the appreciation of the audience. Their works may be compared to the novels of Mr. George Meredith, who would have been a great comic writer if he had lived in the days of Congreve. No one would call Mr. Meredith's novels unnatural; yet his works will convey but little notion of the English society of the nineteenth century to posterity, who will only need to turn to George Eliot and Anthony Trollope to realize it as no bygone age was ever realized before.