If it be said, that there is the same fund of absurdity and prejudice in the world as ever—that there are the same unaccountable perversities lurking at the bottom of every breast,—I should answer, Be it so: but at least we keep our follies to ourselves as much as possible; we palliate, shuffle, and equivocate with them; they sneak into bye-corners, and do not, like _Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims_, march along the high road, and form a procession; they do not entrench themselves strongly behind custom and precedent; they are not embodied in professions and ranks in life; they are not organized into a system; they do not openly resort to a standard, but are a sort of straggling non-descripts, that, like _Wart_, ‘present no mark to the foeman.’ As to the gross and palpable absurdities of modern manners, they are too shallow and barefaced, and those who affect are too little _serious_ in them, to make them worth the detection of the Comic Muse. They proceed from an idle, impudent affectation of folly in general, in the dashing _bravura_ style, not from an infatuation with any of its characteristic modes. In short, the proper object of ridicule is _egotism_: and a man cannot be a very great egotist, who every day sees himself represented on the stage. We are deficient in comedy, because we are without characters in real life—as we have no historical pictures, because we have no faces proper for them. It is, indeed, the evident tendency of all literature to generalise and _dissipate_ character, by giving men the same artificial education, and the same common stock of ideas; so that we see all objects from the same point of view, and through the same reflected medium;—we learn to exist, not in ourselves, but in books;—all men become alike mere readers—spectators, not actors in the scene, and lose their proper personal identity. The templar, the wit, the man of pleasure, and the man of fashion, the courtier and the citizen, the knight and the squire, the lover and the miser—_Lovelace_, _Lothario_, _Will Honeycomb_, and _Sir Roger de Coverley_, _Sparkish_ and _Lord Foppington_, _Western_ and _Tom Jones_, _My Father_ and _My Uncle Toby_, _Millamant_ and _Sir Sampson Legend_, _Don Quixote_ and _Sancho_, _Gil Blas_ and _Guzman d’Alfarache_, _Count Fathom_ and _Joseph Surface_,—have met and exchanged common-places on the barren plains of the _haute littérature_—toil slowly on to the temple of science, ‘seen a long way off upon a level,’ and end in one dull compound of politics, criticism, and metaphysics!