their attention, he has abstained from all such comic intermixtures.
It was also an object with him, that the clowns or buffoons should not
occupy a more important place than that which he had assigned them: he
expressly condemns the extemporizing with which they loved to enlarge
their parts.[26] Johnson founds the justification of the species of
drama in which seriousness and mirth are mixed, on this, that in real
life the vulgar is found close to the sublime, that the merry and the
sad usually accompany and succeed each other. But it does not follow
that, because both are found together, therefore they must not be
separable in the compositions of art. The observation is in other
respects just, and this circumstance invests the poet with a power to
adopt this procedure, because everything in the drama must be
regulated by the conditions of theatrical probability; but the mixture
of such dissimilar, and apparently contradictory, ingredients, in the
same works, can be justifiable only on principles reconcilable with
the views of art which I have already described. In the dramas of
Shakespeare the comic scenes are the antechamber of the poetry, where
the servants remain; these prosaic attendants must not raise their
voices so high as to deafen the speakers in the presence-chamber;
however, in those intervals when the ideal society has retired they
deserve to be listened to; their bold raillery, their presumption of
mockery, may afford many an insight into the situation and
circumstances of their masters.

Shakespeare's comic talent is equally wonderful with that which he has
shown in the pathetic and tragic: it stands on an equal elevation, and
possesses equal extent and profundity; in all that I have hitherto
said, I only wished to guard against admitting that the former
preponderated. He is highly inventive in comic situations and motives:
it will be hardly possible to show whence he has taken any of them,