human life, that which is peculiar in the manners of any person, and distinguishes him from all others.

Poetry, particularly the epopee and drama, is the effect or result of the manners or peculiarities by which each person is distinguished from others.

The poetical character is not properly any particular virtue or quality, but a composition of several which are mixed together in different degrees, according to the necessity of the fable and the unity of the action; there must be one, however, to reign over all the rest, and this must be found, in some degree, in every part. The first quality in Achilles is wrath, in Ulysses dissimulation, and in Æneas mildness; but as these characters cannot stand alone, they must be accompanied with others to embellish them, as far as they are capable, either by hiding their defects, as in the anger of Achilles, which is palliated by extraordinary valour; or by making them centre in some solid virtue, as in Ulysses, whose dissimulation constitutes part of his prudence; and in Æneas, whose mildness is employed in submission to the will of the gods. In the making up of this union, it is to be observed, that the poets have joined together such qualities as are by nature the most compatible; valour with anger, piety with mildness, and prudence with dissimulation. The fable required prudence in Ulysses and piety in Æneas; in this, therefore, the poets were not left to their own choice. But Homer might have made Achilles a coward without abating anything from the justness of his fable; and it was only the necessity of adorning his character that obliged him to make him valiant. The character, then, of a hero in the epic poem is compounded of three sorts of qualities; the first essential to the fable, the second embellishments of the first, while valour, which sustains the other two, constitutes the third.

Unity of character is as necessary as the unity of the fable. For this purpose a person should be the same from the beginning to the end; not that he is always to betray identical sentiments, or one passion; but that he should never speak nor act inconsistently with his fundamental character. For instance, the weak may sometimes burst into warmth, and the breast of the passionate may be calm; a change which often introduces into the drama a very affecting variety; but if the natural disposition of the former were to be represented as boisterous, and that of the latter as mild and soft, they would both act out of character, and contradict their personality.

True characters are such as we actually see in men, or as may exist without any contradiction to nature. No man questions but there have been men as generous and as good as Æneas, as passionate and as violent as Achilles, as prudent and as wise as Ulysses, as impious and atheistical as Mezentius, and as amorous and passionate as Dido. All these characters, therefore, are true, and nothing but just imitations of nature. On the contrary, a character is false when the author so feigns it that one can see nothing like it in the order of nature in which he designs it shall stand. Such characters should be wholly excluded from a poem, because, transgressing the bounds of probability and reason, they meet with no belief from the reader. They are fictions of the poet's brain, not imitations of nature; and yet all poetry consists of an imitation of nature.