Note 332 — Chapter XII · ULTIMATE VALUE AND LIMITATIONS OF LAUGHTER.
Reading edition
The reference is to an article, “Ridicule and Truth” in the Cornhill Magazine, 1877, pp. 580–95. Lessing’s plea, in his Hamburg. Dramaturgie (Stücke 28 and 29), on behalf of a corrective virtue in comedy owed something, I suspect, to the reading of Shaftesbury and the other English writers.