As to comedy, it should certainly be a lively representation of the manners of the people for whom it is written; that it may serve them as a mirror to shew them their vices and follies. Terence and Plautus mistook their subjects; but their predecessors, Aristophanes and Menander, displayed Athenian manners before an Athenian audience; and since these, Moliere, and Moliere only, has represented still more ingenuously in France the manners of the French in the last age. The objects of the picture are since changed; but they have never since had so faithful, so masterly a painter. At present, they only copy on the theatre the manner of conversing in about an hundred families in Paris; and this is their representation of French manners: so that there are in this great city five or six hundred thousand persons, whose various characters are never introduced on the stage. Moliere described the shopkeeper and artisan, as well as the Marquis; Socrates introduces the discourses of coachmen, carpenters, shoemakers, and masons. But our present writers, quite of another stamp, think it beneath them to know what passes in a trader’s counting house or the shop of a mechanic: their dramas must consist of persons of the first quality; for by the grandeur of their characters, they aim at a degree of eminence they never could attain by the assistance of genius. Nay, the audience itself is become so very delicate, that the chief of the spectators are as jealous of place and precedence in going to a play as in making a visit, never condescending to be present at the representation of characters of inferior condition.