Shadwell, who has left us nearly twenty comedies, and “the god of whose idolatry” was Jonson, in his copious prefaces, and prologues and epilogues, overflows with his egotistical admiration of “the humours.” In his preface to The Sullen Lovers, he says that we are not to expect the intrigue of comedy, plot and business, lest he should “let fall the humour.” And in The Humourist, he says, “Mr. Jonson was very unjustly taxed for personating particular men,” in the writing of his humours; “but it will ever be the fate of them that write the humours of the town.” We have more of this in the dedication of The Virtuoso, where we are told that “four of the humours are entirely new.” We have his definition of these “humours” in the epilogue to The Humourists, and which is neatly expressed.
| A Humour is the bias of the mind, By which, with violence, ’tis one way inclined; It makes our action lean on one side still; And, in all changes, that way bends the will. |
It is singular that as Jonson has been somewhat censured for drawing so elaborately these artificial men and their humours, Shadwell should have adopted the notion, and made it the staple of his comic invention.
When men were more insulated, and society was less monotonous than at the present day, those whom we now call humourists, without however any allusion to the system of the humours, and whom we now rarely meet with, allowed their peculiar tastes and fancies to be more prominent in their habits, so as to make them more observable, and more the subject of ridicule than we find them in the present level decorum of society.
[1] In the Introduction to Every Man Out of his Humour.
[2] See Nares’ “Glossary” for an account of these Humours in their philosophical sense.
[3] “He was not of an age, but for all time.”—Jonson.
