When comedy is at its best—that is, when we have made the inferior character universal by showing that its faults are natural, or by adding to it some general virtues—we may indeed go further and say that comedy produces perhaps the terror as well as the pity of tragedy, and that the two kinds of writing are, as Socrates said, but one. The tragic or epic hero, portrayed as better than in actual life, may have faults, but so far from despising him on that account, we may not even smile; we like him so much that the faults seem his misfortune. Moreover, if we refer the weakness of the comic character to nature itself, how can we be hard on the individual? And if we add to the faults positive and lovable virtues, will not the comic character seem at last to be tragic? In English drama Falstaff is perhaps the prince of comic characters, so vitally imagined that he lives on the stage apart from any plot; he is a living person, with no virtues at all, yet infinitely likable. He can be played to make the groundlings laugh, but most of us after we have laughed taste profound tragedy in what we have laughed at. He is almost majestic in those moments of cowardice when he portrays himself exactly as he is—when he sees himself, as it were, from outside, and points to those aspects of his frailty which belong to mankind. An actor might play the scenes on the battle-field in _Henry IV_ so as to inspire, not laughter at the fat knight’s depravity, but a pitiful and self-accusing silence. When he finds the corpse of Sir Walter Blunt, just slain—“Soft! who are you? Sir Walter Blunt!—There’s Honour for you! Here’s no vanity!... I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered; there’s but three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life.... I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life; which if I can save, so; if not, honour comes unlooked for.” In French drama Molière brought comedy to an excellence not matched, perhaps, in any other literature, and no imaginative writing is richer than his in general ideas. We laugh at the amusing situation, or delight in the frankly artificial balancing of the plot, but on second thoughts we fall silent, contemplating the universal sweep of humanity, ourselves included, which he has uncovered for us.