What are some characteristics of fiction in volume 4 of Samuel Johnson's The Rambler?

Johnson comments on the strain of realistic fiction he witnesses growing up around him in 1750 and gaining popularity. Its characteristics are, first, showing events that arise from ordinary circumstances in everyday life and, second, depicting characters who act as real people do. He states that these works of modern fiction:

exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.

Johnson contrasts this kind of fiction, which he calls comic romance with the heroic romances that were popular in prior generations. The heroic romances hold our attention because they deal with unusual characters or events, such as hermits, shipwrecks, and battles. In these works, it is not important that the characters behave with psychological realism because it is the fantastic plots that drive these stories.

But precisely because modern fiction relies on realistic characters and is read primarily by impressionable young people, Johnson argues writers should ensure that their characters are morally upright, so that readers don't end up admiring and imitating characters who are evil or morally problematic.

What are the essential characteristics of fiction according to Samuel Johnson in The Rambler, number 4?

In his noteworthy essay published in The Rambler (number 4), Samuel Johnson discusses a number of what he considers the essential characteristics of fiction, including the following:

• Good fiction should (as Horace taught) join profit and delight. In other words, it should offer valuable lessons but should also please. Ideally it should do the first by doing the second.
• Fiction should deal with events and characters that seem realistic and recognizable. It should not deal in fantasies or improbabilities. It should seem credible.
• It should avoid the kind of “wild strain of imagination” that pleased audiences in earlier ages.
• Effective fiction

must arise from general converse and accurate observation of the living world.

• It must not strike readers as unbelievable.
• It must provide worthy lessons to young readers and must not mislead them about the nature of reality.
• It should not corrupt the moral values of the young. By entertaining the young, it should also help teach them the differences between right and wrong and between good and evil.
• It must be realistic but not pernicious or corrupting:

It is justly considered as the greatest excellency of art, to imitate nature; but it is necessary to distinguish those parts of nature, which are most proper for imitation: greater care is still required in representing life, which is so often discoloured by passion, or deformed by wickedness.

• It should accentuate the goodness of the characters it presents more than their flaws.
• It should not be morally ambiguous or confusing.
• Evil should always be presented so that it seems unattractive and unappealing:

Vice, for vice is necessary to be shewn, should always disgust; nor should the graces of gaiety, or the dignity of courage, be so united with it, as to reconcile it to the mind. Wherever it appears, it should raise hatred by the malignity of its practices, and contempt by the meanness of its stratagems: for while it is supported by either parts or spirit, it will be seldom heartily abhorred.