But Sunderland, Godolphin, Lory,[90]

These will appear such chits in story,

'Twill turn all politics to jests,

To be repeated like John Dory,

When fidlers sing at feasts.

Protect us, mighty Providence!

What would these madmen have?

First, they would bribe us without pence,

Deceive us without common sense,

And without power enslave.

Shall free-born men, in humble awe,

Submit to servile shame,

Who from consent and custom draw

The same right to be ruled by law,

Which kings pretend, to reign?

The Duke shall wield his conquering sword,

The chancellor make a speech,

The king shall pledge his honest word,

The pawned revenue sums afford,

And then, come kiss my breech.

So have I seen a king in chess,

(His rooks and knights withdrawn,

His queen and bishops in distress,)

Shifting about grow less and less,

With here and there a pawn.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 86: The famous Chancellor.]

[Footnote 87: Lord Clifford, of Chudleigh, a member of the Cabal

administration.]

[Footnote 88: Bennet, Earl of Arlington, also of the Cabal.]

[Footnote 89: Osborne, Earl of Danby.]

[Footnote 90: Lawrence, Earl of Rochester, son of Lord Clarendon.]

SUUM CUIQUE.

_This poem was probably composed by Mainwaring. Like "Tarquin and

Tullia," it has the rudeness of Oldham's satirical effusions,

instead of the strength and harmony of Dryden._

When lawless men their neighbours dispossess,

The tenants they extirpate or oppress,

And make rude havoc in the fruitful soil,

Which the right owners ploughed with careful toil.

The same proportion does in kingdoms hold;

A new prince breaks the fences of the old,

And will o'er carcases and deserts reign,

Unless the land its rightful lord regain.

He gripes the faithless owners of the place, }

And buys a foreign army to deface }

The feared and hated remnant of their race; }

He starves their forces, and obstructs their trade;

Vast sums are given, and yet no native paid.

The church itself he labours to assail,

And keeps fit tools to break the sacred pale.

Of those let him the guilty roll commence,[91]

Who has betrayed a master and a prince;

A man, seditious, lewd, and impudent;

An engine always mischievously bent;

One who from all the bans of duty swerves,

No tie can hold but that which he deserves;

An author dwindled to a pamphleteer;

Skilful to forge, and always insincere;

Careless exploded practices to mend;

Bold to attack, yet feeble to defend.

Fate's blindfold reign the atheist loudly owns,

And providence blasphemously dethrones.

In vain the leering actor strains his tongue

To cheat, with tears and empty noise, the throng;

Since all men know, whate'er he says or writes,

Revenge, or stronger interest, indites;

And that the wretch employs his venal wit

How to confute what formerly he writ.

Next him the grave Socinian claims a place,

Endowed with reason, though bereft of grace;

A preaching pagan of surpassing fame,

No register records his borrowed name.

O, had the child more happily been bred,

A radiant mitre would have graced his head:

But now unfit, the most he should expect,

Is to be entered of T---- F----'s sect.[92]

To him succeeds, with looks demurely sad,

A gloomy soul, with revelation mad;

False to his friend, and careless of his word;

A dreaming prophet, and a griping lord;

He sells the livings which he can't possess,

And forms that sinecure, his diocese.

Unthinking man! to quit thy barren see }

And vain endeavours in chronology, }

For the more fruitless care of royal charity. }

Thy hoary noddle warns thee to return,

The treason of old age in Wales to mourn;

Nor think the city-poor may less sustain,

Thy place may well be vacant in this reign.

I should admit the booted prelate now,[93]

But he is even for lampoon too low;

The scum and outcast of a royal race,

The nation's grievance, and the gown's disgrace.

None so unlearned did e'er at London sit;

This driveller does the sacred chair besh----t.

I need not brand the spiritual parricide,

Nor draw the weapon dangling by his side;

The astonished world remembers that offence,

And knows he stole the daughter of his prince.

'Tis time enough, in some succeeding age,

To bring this mitred captain on the stage.

These are the leaders in apostacy,

And the blind guides of poor elective majesty;

A thing which commonwealths-men did devise,

Till plots were ripe, to catch the people's eyes.

Their king's a monster, in a quagmire born,

Of all the native brutes the grief and scorn;

With a big snout, cast in a crooked mould,

Which runs with glanders and an inborn cold;

His substance is of clammy snot and phlegm;

Sleep is his essence, and his life a dream.

To Caprea this Tiberius does retire,

To quench with catamite his feeble fire.

Dear catamite! who rules alone the state, }

While monarch dozes on his unpropt height, }

Silent, yet thoughtless, and secure of fate. }

Could you but see the fulsome hero led

By loathing vassals to his noble bed!

In flannel robes the coughing ghost does walk,

And his mouth moats like cleaner breech of hawk;

Corruption, springing from his cankered breast,

Furs up the channel, and disturbs his rest.

With head propt up, the bolstered engine lies;

If pillow slip aside, the monarch dies.

* * * * *

To these poems ascribed to Dryden, may be added the following; which,

however, have so little mark of his hand, that the Editor thinks it

most proper to degrade them into a note. Indeed Dryden could not have

written the first of these without being guilty of gross ingratitude, a

fault which was entirely inconsistent with his character.

_Epitaph on the Earl of Rochester's being dismissed from the Treasury,

in 1687._

Here lies a creature of indulgent fate,

From Tory Hyde, raised to a chit of state;

In chariot now, Elijah-like, he's hurled

To the upper empty regions of the world.

The airy thing cuts through the yielding sky,

And as it goes does into atoms fly;

While we on earth see, with no small delight,

The bird of prey changed to a paper kite;

With drunken pride and rage he did so swell,

The hated thing without compassion fell;

By powerful force of universal prayer,

The ill-blown bubble now is turned to air;

To his first less than nothing he is gone,

By his preposterous transaction.

_Epigram on the Duchess of Portsmouth's Picture._

Sure we do live by Cleopatra's age,

Since Sunderland does govern now the stage;

She of Septimius had nothing made,

Pompey had been alone by her betrayed;

Were she a poet, she would surely boast,

That all the world for pearls had well been lost.

_The Soliloquy of a Royal Exile._

Unhappy I! who, once ordained to bear

God's justice-sword, and be's vicegerent here,

Am now deposed--'gainst me my children rise,

My life must be their only sacrifice;

Highly they me accuse, but nothing prove,

But this is out of tenderness and love.

They seek to spill my blood; 'tis that alone

Must for the nation's crying sins atone.

But careful heaven forewarned me in a dream,

And shewed me that my dangers were extreme;

The heavenly vision spoke, and bade me flee

The ungrateful brood, that were not worthy me;

Alarmed, I fled at the appointed time,

And mere necessity became my crime!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 91: Lord Halifax, whose correspondence with the Prince of

Orange may be seen in Dalrymple's "Memoirs." He wrote several tracts

about the time of the Revolution, and was in religious principle a

Free-thinker.]

[Footnote 92: Who is here meant I am ignorant. T. F., as chief of the

Socinians, is mentioned in a very satirical pamphlet in Somers' Tracts,

entitled, "Remarks from the Country upon the two Letters relating to

the Convocation, and Alterations in the Liturgy."]

[Footnote 93: Compton, Bishop of London, who took up arms in person on

the Revolution, and escorted the Princess, afterwards Queen Anne, from

London. See Vol. IX. p. 303.]

DRYDEN'S

ORIGINAL

PROSE WORKS.

ESSAY OF DRAMATIC POESY.

----_Fungar vice cotis, acutum

Reddere quæ ferrum valet, exors ipsa secandi._

This Essay contains the first detailed view of our author's opinions

concerning the Drama. In many things, particularly in the main point

of preference given to rhyme, he afterwards saw cause to retract some

of the principles here laid down. We have endeavoured elsewhere to

trace the progress and alteration of Dryden's sentiments upon these

subjects.[94] But the reader's attention may be here called to the

elegant form into which he has thrown his Essay, and which has been so

often in vain followed by clumsy imitators. The scene of the dialogue,

and the striking incident by which it is introduced, have the happiest

effect in arresting the attention; and infinite address is displayed in

conducting the subject, from the distant noise of a bloody sea-fight,

into the academic prolusions of dramatic criticism.

The speakers in the dialogue are four; three of whom are persons "whom

their wit and quality have made known to all the town." The fourth, of

whose properties the author speaks more modestly, is NEANDER,

under which feigned appellation Dryden himself is figured. In

corroboration of this, Mr Malone produces two instances, in which

Dryden is called Neander by the famous Corinna, or Eliza Thomas.[95]

Moreover, the curious reader must be informed, that there is an anagram

in the name of the second personage, LISIDEIUS, which points him

out to be Sir Charles Sedley, or Sidley, for his name was spelled both

ways.[96] CRITES, the advocate for blank verse, is Sir Robert Howard,

our author's friend and brother-in-law; who, in the preface to his

plays, published in 1665, had censured rhiming tragedies as unnatural.

Prior has assured us, that EUGENIUS means the witty Earl of

Dorset, then Lord Buckhurst.[97] A very critical observer may remark an

inaccuracy in introducing his lordship as listening to the sound of a

sea-fight, in which he was himself actually engaged.[98] But Dryden did

not mean to identify his speakers, and those shadowed out under them,

otherwise than in their capacity of critics and authors.

Dryden has, with infinite address, avoided, or overcome, the obstacles

which commonly attend an argumentative discussion, in form of a

dialogue. The author of such disputations, in general, so obviously

favours one of the combatants, that we as soon expect Hector to slay

Achilles, or Turnus to defeat Æneas, as nourish the least hope of

the unfriended champion making any effectual resistance. Besides, in

prepared arguments of this sort, as in prepared jests on the stage,

there is an obvious opening left for those thrusts on which the author

chiefly depends for success; so that, instead of admiring the victor,

we are angry at the bad address of his antagonist. All these obstacles

Dryden has contrived to surmount, by the number of his characters, and

the variety of their dialogue, where not only the argument of Neander's

antagonists is fairly stated, but the topics are so judiciously

varied, that the reader is brought to the point which the author aims

at, without stiffness or constraint, as if in the ordinary flow of

literary conversation. Thus, as we never see the purpose which Dryden

wishes to attain, we arrive at his conclusion without fatigue or

prejudice.

The "Essay on Dramatic Poetry" was assailed by several critics. Martin

Clifford, of the Charter-House, accused our author of pilfering from

the French critics, in the second of four very abusive letters. The

only existing edition of these diatribes is one in 1687; but, from

their date and import, this may have been a reprint. Sir Robert Howard

also attacked the Essay, in the preface to his "Duke of Lerma," which

led Dryden to assert his preference of rhyming tragedies, in the

Defence prefixed to the "Indian Emperor." See Vol. III. p. 263.

This Essay was first published in 1668, or perhaps in the December

preceding. Sixteen years afterwards, Dryden bestowed on it a thorough

revisal; and having, in many places, altered and amended the expression

with unusual care, he published a second edition in 1684, with the

following dedication to Lord Buckhurst, afterwards Earl of Dorset.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 94: See the remarks on Dryden's dramatic criticism, subjoined

to his Life, Vol. I]

[Footnote 95: In an elegy on his death, and in a poem addressed

to Captain Gibbon.--_Malone_, Vol. I. p. 63. For aught I know, an

imperfect anagram may be intended; for the letters in the name of

Dryden, with a very little aid, will make out the word _Neander_.]

[Footnote 96: For Dryden's connection with this gay writer, see

the dedication of the "Assignation," Vol. IV. p. 348. Lisideius is

Sidleius, a little changed.]

[Footnote 97: "The most eminent masters in their several ways appealed

to his determination. Waller thought it an honour to consult him in the

softness and harmony of his verse, and Dr Sprat in the delicacy and

turn of his prose. Dryden determines by him, under the character of

Eugenius, as to the laws of dramatic poetry." This occurs in Prior's

dedication of his poems to Lionel, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, in

which he gives his father's character at length, 8vo Edit. 1709.]

[Footnote 98: The evening before the battle, he is said to have

composed the lively song, beginning,

To all you ladies now at land.

Prior gives the following account of the matter. "In the first Dutch

war, he went a volunteer with the Duke of York: his behaviour during

that campaign was such, as distinguished the Sackvill, descended from

that Hildebrand of the name, who was one of the greatest captains that

came into England with the Conqueror. But his making a song the night

before the engagement, and it is one of the prettiest that ever was

made, carries with it so sedate a presence of mind, and such an unusual

gallantry, that it deserves as much to be recorded as Alexander's

jesting with his soldiers before he past the Granicus, or William the

First of Orange giving order over night for a battle, and desiring to

be called in the morning, lest he should happen to sleep too long."]

TO

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE</sc>

CHARLES,

EARL OF DORSET AND MIDDLESEX,

LORD CHAMBERLAIN OF THEIR MAJESTIES' HOUSEHOLD, KNIGHT OF THE MOST

NOBLE ORDER OF THE GARTER, &c.

MY LORD,

As I was lately reviewing my loose papers, amongst the rest I found

this Essay; the writing of which, in this rude and indigested manner,

wherein your lordship now sees it, served as an amusement to me in

the country, when the violence of the last plague had driven me from

the town.[99] Seeing, then, our theatres shut up, I was engaged in

these kind of thoughts with the same delight, with which men think

upon their absent mistresses. I confess I find many things in this

discourse, which I do not now approve; my judgment being not a little

altered since the writing of it, but whether for the better, or the

worse, I know not: neither, indeed, is it much material in an Essay,

where all I have said is problematical. For the way of writing plays

in verse, which I have seemed to favour, I have, since that time, laid

the practice of it aside, till I have more leisure, because I find

it troublesome and slow: But I am no way altered from my opinion of

it, at least with any reasons which have opposed it.[100] For your

lordship may easily observe, that none are very violent against it,

but those who either have not attempted it, or who have succeeded ill

in their attempt. It is enough for me to have your lordship's example

for my excuse in that little which I have done in it; and I am sure my

adversaries can bring no such arguments against verse, as those with

which the fourth act of "Pompey" will furnish me in its defence.[101]

Yet, my lord, you must suffer me a little to complain of you, that

you too soon withdraw from us a contentment, of which we expected the

continuance, because you gave it us so early. It is a revolt, without

occasion, from your party, where your merits had already raised you to

the highest commands, and where you have not the excuse of other men,

that you have been ill used, and therefore laid down arms. I know no

other quarrel you can have to verse, than that which Spurina had to

his beauty, when he tore and mangled the features of his face, only

because they pleased too well the sight.[102] It was an honour which

seemed to wait for you, to lead out a new colony of writers from the

mother-nation: and, upon the first spreading of your ensigns, there had

been many in a readiness to have followed so fortunate a leader; if not

all, yet the better part of poets:

_Pars, indocili melior grege; mollis et exspes

Inominata perprimat cubilia_.

I am almost of opinion, that we should force you to accept of the

command, as sometimes the prætorian bands have compelled their captains

to receive the empire. The court, which is the best and surest judge

of writing, has generally allowed of verse; and, in the town, it has

found favourers of wit and quality. As for your own particular, my

lord, you have yet youth and time enough to give part of them to the

divertisement of the public, before you enter into the serious and more

unpleasant business of the world. That which the French poet said of

the temple of Love, may be as well applied to the temple of the Muses.

The words, as near as I can remember them, were these:

_Le jeune homme à mauvaise grace,

N'ayant pas adoré dans le Temple d'Amour;

Il faut qu'il entre; et pour le sage

Si ce n'est pas son vrai sejour,

C'est un gîte sur son passage_.

I leave the words to work their effect upon your lordship in their own

language, because no other can so well express the nobleness of the

thought; and wish you may be soon called to bear a part in the affairs

of the nation, where I know the world expects you, and wonders why you

have been so long forgotten; there being no person amongst our young

nobility, on whom the eyes of all men are so much bent. But, in the

mean time, your lordship may imitate the course of nature, who gives us

the flower before the fruit; that I may speak to you in the language of

the Muses, which I have taken from an excellent poem to the king:

As Nature, when she fruit designs, thinks fit

By beauteous blossoms to proceed to it;

And while she does accomplish all the spring,

Birds to her secret operations sing.[103]

I confess, I have no greater reason, in addressing this Essay to your

lordship, than that it might awaken in you the desire of writing

something, in whatever kind it be, which might be an honour to our

age and country. And methinks it might have the same effect on you,

which Homer tells us the fight of the Greeks and Trojans before the

fleet, had on the spirit of Achilles; who, though he had resolved not

to engage, yet found a martial warmth to steal upon him at the sight

of blows, the sound of trumpets, and the cries of fighting men. For my

own part, if, in treating of this subject, I sometimes dissent from the

opinion of better wits, I declare it is not so much to combat their

opinions, as to defend my own, which were first made public.[104]

Sometimes, like a scholar in a fencing-school, I put forth myself, and

show my own ill play, on purpose to be better taught. Sometimes I stand

desperately to my arms, like the foot when deserted by their horse,

not in hope to overcome, but only to yield on more honourable terms.

And yet, my lord, this war of opinions, you well know, has fallen out

among the writers of all ages, and sometimes betwixt friends. Only it

has been prosecuted by some, like pedants, with violence of words; and

managed by others like gentlemen, with candour and civility. Even Tully

had a controversy with his dear Atticus; and in one of his dialogues

makes him sustain the part of an enemy in philosophy, who, in his

letters, is his confident of state, and made privy to the most weighty

affairs of the Roman senate. And the same respect which was paid by

Tully to Atticus, we find returned to him afterwards by Cæsar, on a

like occasion, who, answering his book in praise of Cato, made it not

so much his business to condemn Cato, as to praise Cicero.

But that I may decline some part of the encounter with my adversaries,

whom I am neither willing to combat, nor well able to resist; I will

give your lordship the relation of a dispute betwixt some of our wits

on the same subject, in which they did not only speak of plays in

verse, but mingled, in the freedom of discourse, some things of the

ancient, many of the modern, ways of writing; comparing those with

these, and the wits of our nation with those of others: it is true they

differed in their opinions, as it is probable they would: neither do

I take upon me to reconcile, but to relate them; and that, as Tacitus

professes of himself, _Sine studio partium, aut irâ_, without passion,

or interest; leaving your lordship to decide it in favour of which part

you shall judge most reasonable, and withal, to pardon the many errors

of

Your lordship's

Most obedient humble servant,

JOHN DRYDEN.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 99: The great pestilence in 1663.]

[Footnote 100: As early as 1676, Dryden confesses that he had grown

weary of "his long-loved mistress, Rhyme." See the prologue to

"Aureng-Zebe," the last rhyming tragedy which he ever wrote. See

Vol. V. p. 188. But although Dryden sometimes chose to abandon his

own opinions, there is no instance of his owning conversion by the

arguments of his adversaries.]

[Footnote 101: The tragedy of "Pompey the Great," 4to, 1664, translated

out of French by certain persons of honour. Waller wrote the first act;

Lord Buckhurst, it would seem, translated the fourth.]

[Footnote 102: Valerius Maximus, Lib. IV. Cap. 5.]

[Footnote 103: "Poem to the King's most sacred Majesty."--_D'Avenant's

Works_, folio, 1673, p. 268.]

[Footnote 104: See the dedication to the "Rival Ladies," which is

elaborately written in the cause of Rhyme against Blank Verse. Vol. II.

p. 113.]

TO THE READER.

The drift of the ensuing discourse was chiefly to vindicate the honour

of our English writers, from the censure of those who unjustly prefer

the French before them. This I intimate, lest any should think me

so exceeding vain, as to teach others an art which they understand

much better than myself. But if this incorrect Essay, written in the

country without the help of books, or advice of friends, shall find any

acceptance in the world, I promise to myself a better success of the

Second Part, wherein I shall more fully treat of the virtues and faults

of the English poets, who have written either in this, the epic, or the

lyric way.[105]

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote 105: This promise our author never fully performed; although

the "Essay on Epic Poetry," and other parts of his critical works,

exhibit the materials of the proposed Second Part.]

AN

ESSAY

OF

DRAMATIC POESY.

It was that memorable day, in the first summer of the late war, when

our navy engaged the Dutch;[106] a day wherein the two most mighty and

best appointed fleets which any age had ever seen, disputed the command

of the greater half of the globe, the commerce of nations, and the

riches of the universe: while these vast floating bodies, on either

side, moved against each other in parallel lines, and our countrymen,

under the happy conduct of his Royal Highness,[107] went breaking, by

little and little, into the line of the enemies; the noise of the

cannon from both navies reached our ears about the city; so that all

men being alarmed with it, and in a dreadful suspense of the event,

which they knew was then deciding, every one went following the sound

as his fancy led him; and leaving the town almost empty, some took

towards the Park, some cross the river, others down it; all seeking the

noise in the depth of silence.

Amongst the rest, it was the fortune of Eugenius, Crites, Lisideius,

and Neander, to be in company together: three of them persons whom

their wit and quality have made known to all the town; and whom I have

chose to hide under these borrowed names, that they may not suffer by

so ill a relation as I am going to make of their discourse.

Taking then a barge, which a servant of Lisideius had provided for

them, they made haste to shoot the bridge, and left behind them that

great fall of waters which hindered them from hearing what they

desired: after which, having disengaged themselves from many vessels

which rode at anchor in the Thames, and almost blocked up the passage

towards Greenwich, they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars

more gently; and then every one favouring his own curiosity with a

strict silence, it was not long ere they perceived the air to break

about them like the noise of distant thunder, or of swallows in a

chimney: those little undulations of sound, though almost vanishing

before they reached them, yet still seeming to retain somewhat of

their first horror which they had betwixt the fleets. After they had

attentively listened till such time as the sound by little and little

went from them,[108] Eugenius, lifting up his head, and taking notice

of it, was the first who congratulated to the rest that happy omen

of our nation's victory: adding, that we had but this to desire in

confirmation of it, that we might hear no more of that noise which

was now leaving the English coast. When the rest had concurred in the

same opinion, Crites, a person of a sharp judgement, and somewhat too

delicate a taste in wit, which the world hath mistaken in him for ill

nature,[109] said, smiling to us, that if the concernment of this

battle had not been so exceeding great, he could scarce have wished

the victory at the price he knew he must pay for it, in being subject

to the reading and hearing of so many ill verses as he was sure would

be made on that subject. Adding, that no argument could 'scape some

of those eternal rhymers, who watch a battle with more diligence than

the ravens and birds of prey; and the worst of them surest to be first

in upon the quarry; while the better able, either out of modesty writ

not at all, or set that due value upon their poems, as to let them be

often desired, and long expected. There are some of those impertinent

people of whom you speak, answered Lisideius, who, to my knowledge,

are already so provided, either way, that they can produce not only a

panegyric upon the victory, but, if need be, a funeral elegy on the

duke; wherein, after they have crowned his valour with many laurels,

they will at last deplore the odds under which he fell, concluding,

that his courage deserved a better destiny. All the company smiled at

the conceit of Lisideius; but Crites, more eager than before, began

to make particular exceptions against some writers, and said, the

public magistrate ought to send betimes to forbid them; and that it

concerned the peace and quiet of all honest people, that ill poets

should be as well silenced as seditious preachers. In my opinion,

replied Eugenius, you pursue your point too far; for as to my own

particular, I am so great a lover of poesy, that I could wish them all

rewarded, who attempt but to do well; at least, I would not have them

worse used than one of their brethren was by Sylla the dictator: _Quem

in concione vidimus_, (says Tully,) _cum ei libellum malus poeta de

populo subjecisset, quod epigramma in eum fecisset tantummodo alternis

versibus longiusculis, statim ex iis rebus quas tunc vendebat jubere ei

præmium tribui, sub ea conditione ne quid postea scriberet_. I could

wish with all my heart, replied Crites, that many whom we know were

as bountifully thanked upon the same condition, that they would never

trouble us again. For amongst others, I have a mortal apprehension

of two poets, whom this victory, with the help of both her wings,

will never be able to escape. 'Tis easy to guess whom you intend,

said Lisideius; and without naming them, I ask you if one of them

does not perpetually pay us with clenches upon words, and a certain

clownish kind of raillery?[110] If now and then he does not offer a

_catachresis_ or _Cleivelandism_,[111] wresting and torturing a word

into another meaning: in fine, if he be not one of those whom the

French would call _un mauvais buffon_; one who is so much a well-willer

to the satire, that he intends at least to spare no man; and though he

cannot strike a blow to hurt any, yet he ought to be punished for the

malice of the action; as our witches are justly hanged, because they

think themselves to be such; and suffer deservedly for believing they

did mischief, because they meant it.[112] You have described him, said

Crites, so exactly, that I am afraid to come after you with my other

extremity of poetry: he is one of those, who, having had some advantage

of education and converse, knows better than the other what a poet

should be, but puts it into practice more unluckily than any man. His

style and matter are every where alike; he is the most calm, peaceable

writer you ever read: he never disquiets your passions with the least

concernment, but still leaves you in as even a temper as he found you;

he is a very leveller in poetry: he creeps along with ten little words

in every line, and helps out his numbers with _For to_, and _Unto_,

and all the pretty expletives he can find, till he drags them to the

end of another line; while the sense is left tired half way behind it:

he doubly starves all his verses, first, for want of thought, and then

of expression. His poetry neither has wit in it, nor seems to have it;

like him in Martial:

_Pauper videri_ Cinna _vult, et est pauper_.

He affects plainness, to cover his want of imagination: when he writes

the serious way, the highest flight of his fancy is some miserable

antithesis or seeming contradiction; and in the comic, he is still

reaching at some thin conceit, the ghost of a jest, and that too flies

before him, never to be caught. These swallows which we see before us

on the Thames, are the just resemblance of his wit: you may observe how

near the water they stoop, how many proffers they make to dip, and yet

how seldom they touch it; and when they do, 'tis but the surface: they

skim over it but to catch a gnat, and then mount into the air and leave

it.--Well, gentlemen, said Eugenius, you may speak your pleasure of

these authors; but though I and some few more about the town may give

you a peaceable hearing, yet assure yourselves, there are multitudes

who would think you malicious, and them injured; especially him whom

you first described. He is the very Withers of the city:[113] they

have bought more editions of his works than would serve to lay under

all their pies at the Lord Mayor's Christmas. When his famous poem

first came out in the year 1660,[114] I have seen them reading it in

the midst of Change-time; nay, so vehement they were at it, that they

lost their bargain by the candles' ends.[115] But what will you say if

he has been received amongst great persons? I can assure you he is,

this day, the envy of one, who is lord in the art of quibbling; and

who does not take it well, that any man should intrude so far into his

province. All I would wish, replied Crites, is, that they who love

his writings, may still admire him, and his fellow poet: _Qui Bavium

non odit_, &c. is curse sufficient. And farther, added Lisideius, I

believe there is no man who writes well, but would think he had hard

measure, if their admirers should praise any thing of his: _Nam quos

contemnimus, eorum quoque laudes contemnimus_. There are so few who

write well in this age, said Crites, that methinks any praises should

be welcome; they neither rise to the dignity of the last age, nor to

any of the ancients: and we may cry out of the writers of this time,

with more reason than Petronius of his, _Pace vestrâ liceat dixisse,

primi omnium eloquentiam perdidistis_: you have debauched the true old

poetry so far, that nature, which is the soul of it, is not in any of

your writings.

If your quarrel (said Eugenius) to those who now write, be grounded

only on your reverence to antiquity, there is no man more ready to

adore those great Greeks and Romans than I am: but, on the other side,

I cannot think so contemptibly of the age in which I live, or so

dishonourably of my own country, as not to judge we equal the ancients

in most kinds of poesy, and in some surpass them; neither know I any

reason why I may not be as zealous for the reputation of our age, as

we find the ancients themselves were in reverence to those who lived

before them. For you hear your Horace saying,

_Indignor quidquam reprehendi, non quia crassé

Compositum, illepidève putetur, sed quia nuper_.

And after:

_Si meliora dies, ut vina, poemata reddit,

Scire velim, pretium chartis quotus arroget annus?_

But I see I am engaging in a wide dispute, where the arguments are

not like to reach close on either side; for poesy is of so large an

extent, and so many, both of the ancients and moderns, have done well

in all kinds of it, that in citing one against the other, we shall take

up more time this evening, than each man's occasions will allow him:

therefore I would ask Crites to what part of poesy he would confine

his arguments, and whether he would defend the general cause of the

ancients against the moderns, or oppose any age of the moderns against

this of ours.

Crites, a little while considering upon this demand, told Eugenius,

that if he pleased he would limit their dispute to Dramatic Poesy; in

which he thought it not difficult to prove, either that the ancients

were superior to the moderns, or the last age to this of ours.[116]

Eugenius was somewhat surprised, when he heard Crites make choice of

that subject. For aught I see, said he, I have undertaken a harder

province than I imagined; for, though I never judged the plays of the

Greek or Roman poets comparable to ours, yet, on the other side, those

we now see acted come short of many which were written in the last

age. But my comfort is, if we are overcome, it will be only by our own

countrymen: and if we yield to them in this one part of poesy, we more

surpass them in all the other; for in the epic or lyric way, it will

be hard for them to shew us one such amongst them, as we have many now

living, or who lately were. They can produce nothing so courtly writ,

or which expresses so much the conversation of a gentleman, as Sir John

Suckling; nothing so even, sweet, and flowing, as Mr Waller; nothing

so majestic, so correct, as Sir John Denham; nothing so elevated, so

copious, and full of spirit, as Mr Cowley. As for the Italian, French,

and Spanish plays, I can make it evident, that those who now write,

surpass them; and that the drama is wholly ours.

All of them were thus far of Eugenius his opinion, that the sweetness

of English verse was never understood or practised by our fathers; even

Crites himself did not much oppose it: and every one was willing to

acknowledge how much our poesy is improved, by the happiness of some

writers yet living; who first taught us to mould our thoughts into easy

and significant words, to retrench the superfluities of expression, and

to make our rhyme so properly a part of the verse, that it should never

mislead the sense, but itself be led and governed by it.

Eugenius was going to continue this discourse, when Lisideius told

him, that it was necessary, before they proceeded further, to take a

standing measure of their controversy; for how was it possible to be

decided, who wrote the best plays, before we know what a play should

be? but, this once agreed on by both parties, each might have recourse

to it, either to prove his own advantages, or to discover the failings

of his adversary.

He had no sooner said this, but all desired the favour of him to give

the definition of a play; and they were the more importunate, because

neither Aristotle, nor Horace, nor any other, who had writ of that

subject, had ever done it.

Lisideius, after some modest denials, at last confessed he had a rude

notion of it; indeed rather a description than a definition; but which

served to guide him in his private thoughts, when he was to make a

judgment of what others writ: that he conceived a play ought to be, "A

just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and

humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the

delight and instruction of mankind."

This definition (though Crites raised a logical objection against

it--that it was only _à genere et fine_, and so not altogether perfect)

was yet well received by the rest: and after they had given order to

the watermen to turn their barge, and row softly, that they might take

the cool of the evening in their return, Crites, being desired by the

company to begin, spoke on behalf of the ancients, in this manner:--

If confidence presage a victory, Eugenius, in his own opinion, has

already triumphed over the ancients: nothing seems more easy to him,

than to overcome those whom it is our greatest praise to have imitated

well; for we do not only build upon their foundations, but by their

models. Dramatic Poesy had time enough, reckoning from Thespis (who

first invented it) to Aristophanes, to be born, to grow up, and to

flourish in maturity. It has been observed of arts and sciences, that

in one and the same century they have arrived to great perfection;

and no wonder, since every age has a kind of universal genius, which

inclines those that live in it to some particular studies: the work

then being pushed on by many hands, must of necessity go forward.

Is it not evident, in these last hundred years, (when the study of

philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendom,)

that almost a new nature has been revealed to us? that more errors of

the school have been detected, more useful experiments in philosophy

have been made, more noble secrets in optics, medicine, anatomy,

astronomy, discovered, than in all those credulous and doting ages from

Aristotle to us?--so true it is, that nothing spreads more fast than

science, when rightly and generally cultivated.

Add to this, the more than common emulation that was in those times,

of writing well; which though it be found in all ages, and all

persons that pretend to the same reputation, yet poesy being then

in more esteem than now it is, had greater honours decreed to the

professors of it, and consequently the rivalship was more high between

them. They had judges ordained to decide their merit, and prizes to

reward it; and historians have been diligent to record of Æschylus,

Euripides, Sophocles, Lycophron, and the rest of them, both who they

were that vanquished in these wars of the theatre, and how often

they were crowned: while the Asian kings and Grecian commonwealths

scarce afforded them a nobler subject, than the unmanly luxuries of a

debauched court, or giddy intrigues of a factious city:--_Alit æmulatio

ingenia, (says Paterculus) et nunc invidia, nunc admiratio incitationem

accendit_: Emulation is the spur of wit; and sometimes envy, sometimes

admiration, quickens our endeavours.

But now since the rewards of honour are taken away, that virtuous

emulation is turned into direct malice; yet so slothful, that it

contents itself to condemn and cry down others, without attempting to

do better: 'tis a reputation too unprofitable, to take the necessary

pains for it; yet wishing they had it, that desire is incitement

enough to hinder others from it. And this, in short, Eugenius, is

the reason, why you have now so few good poets, and so many severe

judges. Certainly, to imitate the ancients well, much labour and long

study is required; which pains, I have already shewn, our poets would

want encouragement to take, if yet they had ability to go through the

work. Those ancients have been faithful imitators, and wise observers

of that nature which is so torn and ill represented in our plays;

they have handed down to us a perfect resemblance of her; which we,

like ill copiers, neglecting to look on, have rendered monstrous, and

disfigured. But, that you may know how much you are indebted to those

your masters, and be ashamed to have so ill requited them, I must

remember you, that all the rules by which we practise the drama at this

day, (either such as relate to the justness and symmetry of the plot;

or the episodical ornaments, such as descriptions, narrations, and

other beauties, which are not essential to the play;) were delivered

to us from the observations which Aristotle made, of those poets, who

either lived before him, or were his contemporaries. We have added

nothing of our own, except we have the confidence to say, our wit

is better; of which none boast in this our age, but such as

understand not theirs. Of that book which Aristotle has left us,

_ωερὶ τῆς Ποιητικῆς_, Horace his "Art of Poetry," is

an excellent comment, and, I believe, restores to us that Second Book

of his concerning comedy, which is wanting in him.

Out of these two have been extracted the famous rules which the French

call _Des Trois Unites_, or the Three Unities, which ought to be

observed in every regular play; namely, of time, place, and action.

The unity of time they comprehend in twenty-four hours, the compass of

a natural day, or as near as it can be contrived; and the reason of it

is obvious to every one,--that the time of the feigned action, or fable

of the play, should be proportioned as near as can be to the duration

of that time in which it is represented: since therefore all plays are

acted on the theatre in a space of time much within the compass of

twenty-four hours, that play is to be thought the nearest imitation

of nature, whose plot or action is confined within that time. And,

by the same rule which concludes this general proportion of time, it

follows, that all the parts of it are (as near as may be) to be equally

subdivided; namely, that one act take not up the supposed time of half

a day, which is out of proportion to the rest; since the other four are

then to be straitened within the compass of the remaining half: for

it is unnatural, that one act, which being spoke or written, is not

longer than the rest, should be supposed longer by the audience; it is

therefore the poet's duty, to take care, that no act should be imagined

to exceed the time in which it is represented on the stage; and that

the intervals and inequalities of time be supposed to fall out between

the acts.

This rule of time, how well it has been observed by the ancients, most

of their plays will witness. You see them in their tragedies, (wherein

to follow this rule is certainly most difficult,) from the very

beginning of their plays, falling close into that part of the story

which they intend for the action, or principal object of it, leaving

the former part to be delivered by narration: so that they set the

audience, as it were, at the post where the race is to be concluded;

and saving them the tedious expectation of seeing the poet set out and

ride the beginning of the course, they suffer you not to behold him,

till he is in sight of the goal, and just upon you.

For the second unity, which is that of place, the ancients meant by

it, that the scene ought to be continued through the play, in the same

place where it was laid in the beginning: for the stage, on which it

is represented, being but one and the same place, it is unnatural to

conceive it many; and those far distant from one another. I will not

deny, but by the variation of painted scenes, the fancy (which in

these cases will contribute to its own deceit) may sometimes imagine

it several places, with some appearance of probability; yet it still

carries the greater likelihood of truth, if those places be supposed

so near each other, as in the same town or city, which may all be

comprehended under the larger denomination of one place: for a greater

distance will bear no proportion to the shortness of time which is

allotted, in the acting, to pass from one of them to another. For the

observation of this, next to the ancients, the French are to be most

commended. They tie themselves so strictly to the unity of place, that

you never see in any of their plays, a scene changed in the middle of

an act: if the act begins in a garden, a street, or chamber, 'tis ended

in the same place; and that you may know it to be the same, the stage

is so supplied with persons, that it is never empty all the time: he

who enters second, has business with him who was on before; and before

the second quits the stage, a third appears who has business with

him. This Corneille calls _la liaison des Scenes_, the continuity or

joining of the scenes; and 'tis a good mark of a well-contrived play,

when all the persons are known to each other, and every one of them has

some affairs with all the rest.

As for the third unity, which is that of action, the ancients meant no

other by it than what the logicians do by their _finis_, the end or

scope of any action; that which is the first in intention, and last in

execution. Now the poet is to aim at one great and complete action,

to the carrying on of which all things in his play, even the very

obstacles, are to be subservient; and the reason of this is as evident

as any of the former.

For two actions equally laboured and driven on by the writer, would

destroy the unity of the poem; it would be no longer one play, but two:

not but that there may be many actions in a play, as Ben Jonson has

observed in his "Discoveries;"[117] but they must be all subservient

to the great one, which our language happily expresses in the name

of under-plots: such as in Terence's "Eunuch" is the difference and

reconcilement of Thais and Phædria, which is not the chief business of

the play, but promotes the marriage of Chærea and Chremes's sister,

principally intended by the poet. There ought to be but one action,

says Corneille, that is, one complete action, which leaves the mind

of the audience in a full repose; but this cannot be brought to pass,

but by many other imperfect actions, which conduce to it, and hold the

audience in a delightful suspense of what will be.

If by these rules (to omit many other drawn from the precepts and

practice of the ancients) we should judge our modern plays, 'tis

probable, that few of them would endure the trial: that which should

be the business of a day, takes up in some of them an age; instead of

one action, they are the epitomes of a man's life; and for one spot

of ground (which the stage should represent) we are sometimes in more

countries than the map can show us.

But if we allow the ancients to have contrived well, we must

acknowledge them to have written better. Questionless we are deprived

of a great stock of wit in the loss of Menander among the Greek poets,

and of Cæcilius, Afranius, and Varius, among the Romans. We may guess

at Menander's excellency, by the plays of Terence, who translated

some of his; and yet wanted so much of him, that he was called by C.

Cæsar the half-Menander; and may judge of Varius, by the testimonies

of Horace, Martial, and Velleius Paterculus. 'Tis probable that these,

could they be recovered, would decide the controversy; but so long as

Aristophanes and Plautus are extant, while the tragedies of Euripides,

Sophocles, and Seneca, are in our hands, I can never see one of those

plays which are now written, but it increases my admiration of the

ancients. And yet I must acknowledge further, that to admire them as

we ought, we should understand them better than we do. Doubtless many

things appear flat to us, the wit of which depended on some custom or

story, which never came to our knowledge; or perhaps on some criticism

in their language, which being so long dead, and only remaining

in their books, 'tis not possible they should make us understand

perfectly. To read Macrobius, explaining the propriety and elegancy

of many words in Virgil, which I had before passed over without

consideration, as common things, is enough to assure me, that I ought

to think the same of Terence; and that in the purity of his style,

(which Tully so much valued, that he ever carried his works about him,)

there is yet left in him great room for admiration, if I knew but where

to place it. In the mean time, I must desire you to take notice, that

the greatest man of the last age (Ben Jonson) was willing to give place

to them in all things: he was not only a professed imitator of Horace,

but a learned plagiary of all the others; you track him every where in

their snow. If Horace, Lucan, Petronius Arbiter, Seneca, and Juvenal,

had their own from him, there are few serious thoughts which are new

in him: you will pardon me, therefore, if I presume he loved their

fashion, when he wore their clothes.[118] But since I have otherwise a

great veneration for him, and you, Eugenius, prefer him above all other

poets,[119] I will use no farther argument to you than his example: I

will produce before you father Ben, dressed in all the ornaments and

colours of the ancients; you will need no other guide to our party,

if you follow him; and whether you consider the bad plays of our age,

or regard the good plays of the last, both the best and worst of the

modern poets will equally instruct you to admire the ancients.

Crites had no sooner left speaking, but Eugenius, who had waited with

some impatience for it, thus began:--

I have observed in your speech, that the former part of it is

convincing, as to what the moderns have profited by the rules of

the ancients; but in the latter you are careful to conceal how much

they have excelled them. We own all the helps we have from them, and

want neither veneration nor gratitude, while we acknowledge, that to

overcome them we must make use of the advantages we have received from

them: but to these assistances we have joined our own industry; for,

had we sat down with a dull imitation of them, we might then have

lost somewhat of the old perfection, but never acquired any that was

new. We draw not therefore after their lines, but those of nature; and

having the life before us, besides the experience of all they knew, it

is no wonder if we hit some airs and features which they have missed. I

deny not what you urge of arts and sciences, that they have flourished

in some ages more than others; but your instance in philosophy makes

for me: for if natural causes be more known now than in the time of

Aristotle, because more studied, it follows, that poesy and other arts

may, with the same pains, arrive still nearer to perfection; and, that

granted, it will rest for you to prove, that they wrought more perfect

images of human life, than we; which seeing in your discourse you have

avoided to make good, it shall now be my task to shew you some part of

their defects, and some few excellencies of the moderns. And I think

there is none among us can imagine I do it enviously, or with purpose

to detract from them; for what interest of fame or profit can the

living lose by the reputation of the dead? On the other side, it is a

great truth which Velleius Paterculus affirms: _Audita visis libentius

laudamus; et præsentia invidiâ, præterita admiratione prosequimur;

et his nos obrui, illis instrui credimus_: that praise or censure is

certainly the most sincere, which unbribed posterity shall give us.

Be pleased then, in the first place, to take notice, that the Greek

poesy, which Crites has affirmed to have arrived to perfection in the

reign of the old comedy, was so far from it, that the distinction of

it into acts was not known to them; or if it were, it is yet so darkly

delivered to us, that we cannot make it out.

All we know of it is, from the singing of their chorus; and that

too is so uncertain, that in some of their plays we have reason to

conjecture they sung more than five times. Aristotle indeed divides

the integral parts of a play into four. First, the _Protasis_, or

entrance, which gives light only to the characters of the persons,

and proceeds very little into any part of the action. Secondly, the

_Epitasis_, or working up of the plot; where the play grows warmer, the

design or action of it is drawing on, and you see something promising

that it will come to pass. Thirdly, the _Catastasis_, called by the

Romans, _Status_, the height and full growth of the play: we may call

it properly the counter-turn, which destroys that expectation, embroils

the action in new difficulties, and leaves you far distant from that

hope in which it found you; as you may have observed in a violent

stream, resisted by a narrow passage,--it runs round to an eddy, and

carries back the waters with more swiftness than it brought them on.

Lastly, the _Catastrophe_, which the Grecians called λυσις,

the French _le denouement_, and we the discovery, or unravelling of

the plot: there you see all things settling again upon their first

foundations, and, the obstacles which hindered the design or action

of the play once removed, it ends with that resemblance of truth and

nature, that the audience are satisfied with the conduct of it. Thus

this great man delivered to us the image of a play; and I must confess

it is so lively, that from thence much light has been derived to the

forming it more perfectly into acts and scenes: but what poet first

limited to five the number of the acts, I know not; only we see it

so firmly established in the time of Horace, that he gives it for a

rule in comedy,--_Neu brevior quinto, neu sit productior actu_. So

that you see the Grecians cannot be said to have consummated this art;

writing rather by entrances, than by acts, and having rather a general

indigested notion of a play, than knowing how, and where to bestow the

particular graces of it.

But since the Spaniards at this day allow but three acts, which they

call _Jornadas_, to a play, and the Italians in many of theirs follow

them, when I condemn the ancients, I declare it is not altogether

because they have not five acts to every play, but because they have

not confined themselves to one certain number: it is building an house

without a model; and when they succeeded in such undertakings, they

ought to have sacrificed to Fortune, not to the Muses.

Next, for the plot, which Aristotle called τὸ μυθὸς, and often

των πραγμάτων συ΄νθεσις, and from him the

Romans _Fabula_, it has already been judiciously observed by a late

writer, that in their tragedies it was only some tale derived from

Thebes or Troy, or at least something that happened in those two ages;

which was worn so thread-bare by the pens of all the epic poets, and

even by tradition itself of the talkative Greeklings, (as Ben Jonson

calls them,) that before it came upon the stage, it was already known

to all the audience; and the people, so soon as ever they heard the

name of Œdipus, knew as well as the poet, that he had killed his

father by a mistake, and committed incest with his mother, before the

play; that they were now to hear of a great plague, an oracle, and the

ghost of Laius: so that they sate with a yawning kind of expectation,

till he was to come with his eyes pulled out, and speak a hundred or

more verses in a tragic tone, in complaint of his misfortunes. But one

Œdipus, Hercules, or Medea, had been tolerable; poor people, they

escaped not so good cheap; they had still the _chapon bouillé_ set

before them, till their appetites were cloyed with the same dish, and,

the novelty being gone, the pleasure vanished; so that one main end of

Dramatic Poesy in its definition, which was to cause delight, was of

consequence destroyed.[120]

In their comedies, the Romans generally borrowed their plots from the

Greek poets; and theirs was commonly a little girl stolen or wandered

from her parents, brought back unknown to the city, there got with

child by some lewd young fellow, who, by the help of his servant,

cheats his father; and when her time comes, to cry--_Juno Lucina, fer

opem_, one or other sees a little box or cabinet which was carried

away with her, and so discovers her to her friends, if some god do not

prevent it, by coming down in a machine, and taking the thanks of it to

himself.

By the plot you may guess much of the characters of the persons. An old

father, who would willingly, before he dies, see his son well married;

his debauched son, kind in his nature to his mistress, but miserably

in want of money; a servant or slave, who has so much wit to strike

in with him, and help to dupe his father; a braggadocio captain, a

parasite, and a lady of pleasure.

As for the poor honest maid, on whom the story is built, and who ought

to be one of the principal actors in the play, she is commonly a mute

in it: she has the breeding of the old Elizabeth way, which was for

maids to be seen, and not to be heard; and it is enough you know she is

willing to be married, when the fifth act requires it.

These are plots built after the Italian mode of houses,--you see

through them all at once: the characters are indeed the imitations of

nature, but so narrow, as if they had imitated only an eye or an hand,

and did not dare to venture on the lines of a face, or the proportion

of a body.

But in how straight a compass soever they have bounded their plots and

characters, we will pass it by, if they have regularly pursued them,

and perfectly observed those three unities of time, place, and action;

the knowledge of which you say is derived to us from them. But, in

the first place, give me leave to tell you, that the unity of place,

however it might be practised by them, was never any of their rules:

we neither find it in Aristotle, Horace, or any who have written of

it, till in our age the French poets first made it a precept of the

stage. The unity of time, even Terence himself, who was the best and

most regular of them, has neglected: his "_Heautontimorumenos_," or

Self-punisher, takes up visibly two days, says Scaliger; the two first

acts concluding the first day, the three last the day ensuing; and

Euripides, in tying himself to one day, has committed an absurdity

never to be forgiven him; for in one of his tragedies he has made

Theseus go from Athens to Thebes, which was about forty English miles,

under the walls of it to give battle, and appear victorious in the

next act; and yet, from the time of his departure to the return of the

Nuntius, who gives the relation of his victory, Æthra and the Chorus

have but thirty-six verses; which is not for every mile a verse.

The like error is as evident in Terence his "Eunuch," when Laches, the

old man, enters by mistake into the house of Thais; where, betwixt his

exit, and the entrance of Pythias, who comes to give ample relation

of the disorders he has raised within, Parmeno, who was left upon the

stage, has not above five lines to speak. _C'est bien employer un temps

si court_, says the French poet, who furnished me with one of the

observations: and almost all their tragedies will afford us examples of

the like nature.

It is true, they have kept the continuity, or, as you called it,

_liaison des Scenes_, somewhat better: two do not perpetually come in

together, talk, and go out together; and other two succeed them, and

do the same throughout the act, which the English call by the name

of single scenes; but the reason is, because they have seldom above

two or three scenes, properly so called, in every act; for it is to

be accounted a new scene, not only every time the stage is empty, but

every person who enters, though to others, makes it so; because he

introduces a new business. Now the plots of their plays being narrow,

and the persons few, one of their acts was written in a less compass

than one of our well-wrought scenes; and yet they are often deficient

even in this. To go no farther than Terence, you find in the "Eunuch,"

Antipho entering single in the midst of the third act, after Chremes

and Pythias were gone off: in the same play you have likewise Dorias

beginning the fourth act alone; and after she has made a relation of

what was done at the Soldier's entertainment, (which by the way was

very inartificial, because she was presumed to speak directly to the

audience, and to acquaint them with what was necessary to be known, but

yet should have been so contrived by the poet, as to have been told

by persons of the drama to one another, and so by them to have come to

the knowledge of the people,) she quits the stage, and Phædria enters

next, alone likewise: he also gives you an account of himself, and of

his returning from the country, in monologue; to which unnatural way

of narration Terence is subject in all his plays. In his "Adelphi, or

Brothers," Syrus and Demea enter after the scene was broken by the

departure of Sostrata, Geta, and Canthara; and indeed you can scarce

look into any of his comedies, where you will not presently discover

the same interruption.

But as they have failed both in laying of their plots, and in

the management, swerving from the rules of their own art, by

misrepresenting nature to us, in which they have ill satisfied one

intention of a play, which was delight; so in the instructive part they

have erred worse: instead of punishing vice, and rewarding virtue,

they have often shewn a prosperous wickedness, and an unhappy piety:

they have set before us a bloody image of revenge in Medea, and given

her dragons to convey her safe from punishment. A Priam and Astyanax

murdered, and Cassandra ravished, and the lust and murder ending in the

victory of him who acted them. In short, there is no indecorum in any

of our modern plays, which, if I would excuse, I could not shadow with

some authority from the ancients.

And one farther note of them let me leave you: tragedies and comedies

were not writ then as they are now, promiscuously, by the same person;

but he who found his genius bending to the one, never attempted the

other way. This is so plain, that I need not instance to you, that

Aristophanes, Plautus, Terence, never any of them writ a tragedy;

Æschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca, never meddled with comedy:

the sock and buskin were not worn by the same poet. Having then so

much care to excel in one kind, very little is to be pardoned them,

if they miscarried in it; and this would lead me to the consideration

of their wit, had not Crites given me sufficient warning not to be

too bold in my judgment of it; because, the languages being dead, and

many of the customs and little accidents on which it depended, lost to

us, we are not competent judges of it. But though I grant, that here

and there we may miss the application of a proverb or a custom, yet a

thing well said will be wit in all languages; and though it may lose

something in the translation, yet to him who reads it in the original,

'tis still the same; he has an idea of its excellency, though it cannot

pass from his mind into any other expression or words than those in

which he finds it. When Phædria in the "Eunuch" had a command from his

mistress to be absent two days, and encouraging himself to go through

with it, said, _Tandem ego non illâ caream, si sit opus, vel totum

triduum?_ Parmeno, to mock the softness of his master, lifting up his

hands and eyes, cries out, as it were in admiration, _Hui! universum

triduum!_ the elegancy of which _universum_, though it cannot be

rendered in our language, yet leaves an impression on our souls. But

this happens seldom in him; in Plautus oftener, who is infinitely too

bold in his metaphors and coining words, out of which many times his

wit is nothing; which questionless was one reason why Horace falls upon

him so severely in those verses:

_Sed proavi nostri Plautinos et numeros, et

Laudavere sales, nimium patienter utrumque,

Ne dicam stolide_.[121]

For Horace himself was cautious to obtrude a new word on his readers,

and makes custom and common use the best measure of receiving it into

writings:

_Multa renascentur quæ nunc [jam] cecidere, cadentque

Quæ nunc sunt in honore vocabula, si volet usus,

Quem penes arbitrium est, et jus, et norma loquendi_.

The not observing this rule is that which the world has blamed in our

satyrist, Cleiveland; to express a thing hard and unnaturally, is his

new way of elocution. It is true, no poet but may sometimes use a

catachresis; Virgil does it,--

_Mistaque ridenti colocasia fundet acantho_,--

in his eclogue of Pollio; and in his seventh[122] Æneid,

----_mirantur et undæ,

Miratur nemus, insuetum fulgentia longe

Scuta virum fluvio, pictasque innare carinas_.

And Ovid once so modestly, that he asks leave to do it:

----_[quem] si verbo audacia detur,

Haud metuam summi dixisse Palatia cœli_.

calling the court of Jupiter by the name of Augustus his palace; though

in another place he is more bold, where he says, _Et longas visent

Capitolia pompas_.[123] But to do this always, and never be able to

write a line without it, though it may be admired by some few pedants,

will not pass upon those who know that wit is best conveyed to us in

the most easy language; and is most to be admired when a great thought

comes dressed in words so commonly received, that it is understood

by the meanest apprehensions, as the best meat is the most easily

digested. But we cannot read a verse of Cleiveland's without making a

face at it, as if every word were a pill to swallow: He gives us many

times a hard nut to break our teeth, without a kernel for our pains. So

that there is this difference betwixt his satires and Doctor Donne's,

that the one gives us deep thoughts in common language, though rough

cadence; the other gives us common thoughts in abstruse words. It is

true, in some places his wit is independent of his words, as in that of

the rebel Scot:

Had Cain been Scot, God would have changed his doom;

Not forced him wander, but confined him home.[124]

_Si sic omnia dixisset!_ This is wit in all languages: it is like

mercury, never to be lost or killed:--and so that other,

For beauty, like white-powder, makes no noise,

And yet the silent hypocrite destroys.

You see the last line is highly metaphorical, but it is so soft and

gentle, that it does not shock us as we read it.

But, to return from whence I have digressed, to the consideration of

the ancients' writing, and their wit; of which, by this time, you

will grant us in some measure to be fit judges. Though I see many

excellent thoughts in Seneca, yet he, of them who had a genius most

proper for the stage, was Ovid; he had a way of writing so fit to stir

up a pleasing admiration and concernment, which are the objects of a

tragedy, and to shew the various movements of a soul combating betwixt

two different passions, that had he lived in our age, or in his own

could have writ with our advantages, no man but must have yielded to

him; and therefore I am confident the "Medea" is none of his; for

though I esteem it for the gravity and sententiousness of it, which he

himself concludes to be suitable to a tragedy,--_Omne genus scripti

gravitate Tragœdia vincit_,--yet it moves not my soul enough to

judge that he, who in the epic way wrote things so near the drama, as

the story of Myrrha, of Caunus and Biblis, and the rest, should stir up

no more concernment where he most endeavoured it.[125] The master-piece

of Seneca I hold to be that scene in the "Troades," where Ulysses is

seeking for Astyanax to kill him: there you see the tenderness of a

mother, so represented in Andromache, that it raises compassion to a

high degree in the reader, and bears the nearest resemblance of any

thing in the tragedies of the ancients, to the excellent scenes of

passion in Shakespeare, or in Fletcher.--For love-scenes you will

find few among them; their tragic poets dealt not with that soft

passion, but with lust, cruelty, revenge, ambition, and those bloody

actions they produced; which were more capable of raising horror than

compassion in an audience: leaving love untouched, whose gentleness

would have tempered them, which is the most frequent of all the

passions, and which, being the private concernment of every person, is

soothed by viewing its own image in a public entertainment.

Among their comedies, we find a scene or two of tenderness, and that

where you would least expect it, in Plautus; but to speak generally,

their lovers say little, when they see each other, but _anima mea, vita

mea_; ζωὴ και ψυχῆ, as the women in Juvenal's time used to

cry out in the fury of their kindness. Any sudden gust of passion (as

an ecstasy of love in an unexpected meeting) cannot better be expressed

than in a word, and a sigh, breaking one another. Nature is dumb on

such occasions; and to make her speak, would be to represent her unlike

herself. But there are a thousand other concernments of lovers, as

jealousies, complaints, contrivances, and the like, where not to open

their minds at large to each other, were to be wanting to their own

love, and to the expectation of the audience; who watch the movements

of their minds, as much as the changes of their fortunes. For the

imagining of the first is properly the work of a poet; the latter he

borrows from the historian.

Eugenius was proceeding in that part of his discourse, when Crites

interrupted him. I see, said he, Eugenius and I are never like to

have this question decided betwixt us; for he maintains, the moderns

have acquired a new perfection in writing, I can only grant they have

altered the mode of it, Homer described his heroes men of great

appetites, lovers of beef broiled upon the coals, and good fellows;

contrary to the practice of the French romances, whose heroes neither

eat, nor drink, nor sleep, for love. Virgil makes Æneas a bold avower

of his own virtues:

_Sum pius Æneas famâ super æthera notus_;

which, in the civility of our poets, is the character of a fanfaron, or

Hector: for with us the knight takes occasion to walk out, or sleep,

to avoid the vanity of telling his own story, which the trusty squire

is ever to perform for him. So in their love-scenes, of which Eugenius

spoke last, the ancients were more hearty, we more talkative: they writ

love as it was then the mode to make it; and I will grant this much to

Eugenius, that perhaps one of their poets, had he lived in our age,

_Si foret hoc nostrum fato delapsus in ævum_,

as Horace says of Lucilius, he had altered many things; not that they

were not natural before, but that he might accommodate himself to the

age in which he lived. Yet in the mean time we are not to conclude any

thing rashly against those great men, but preserve to them the dignity

of masters, and give that honour to their memories,--_quos Libitina

sacravit_,--part of which we expect may be paid to us in future times.

This moderation of Crites, as it was pleasing to all the company, so

it put an end to that dispute; which Eugenius, who seemed to have the

better of the argument, would urge no farther. But Lisideius, after

he had acknowledged himself of Eugenius his opinion concerning the

ancients, yet told him, he had forborne, till his discourse were ended,

to ask him, why he preferred the English plays above those of other

nations? and whether we ought not to submit our stage to the exactness

of our next neighbours?

Though, said Eugenius, I am at all times ready to defend the honour of

my country against the French, and to maintain, we are as well able

to vanquish them with our pens, as our ancestors have been with their

swords; yet, if you please, added he, looking upon Neander, I will

commit this cause to my friend's management; his opinion of our plays

is the same with mine: and besides, there is no reason, that Crites and

I, who have now left the stage, should re-enter so suddenly upon it;

which is against the laws of comedy.

If the question had been stated, replied Lisideius, who had writ best,

the French or English, forty years ago, I should have been of your

opinion, and adjudged the honour to our own nation; but since that

time, (said he, turning towards Neander,) we have been so long together

bad Englishmen, that we had not leisure to be good poets. Beaumont,

Fletcher, and Jonson, (who were only capable of bringing us to that

degree of perfection which we have,) were just then leaving the world;

as if in an age of so much horror, wit, and those milder studies of

humanity, had no farther business among us. But the muses, who ever

follow peace, went to plant in another country: it was then that the

great Cardinal of Richelieu began to take them into his protection;

and that, by his encouragement, Corneille, and some other Frenchmen,

reformed their theatre, which before was as much below ours, as it

now surpasses it and the rest of Europe. But because Crites, in his

discourse for the ancients, has prevented me, by observing many rules

of the stage, which the moderns have borrowed from them, I shall only,

in short, demand of you, whether you are not convinced that of all

nations the French have best observed them? In the unity of time you

find them so scrupulous, that it yet remains a dispute among their

poets, whether the artificial day of twelve hours, more or less, be

not meant by Aristotle, rather than the natural one of twenty-four;

and consequently, whether all plays ought not to be reduced into that

compass. This I can testify, that in all their dramas writ within

these last twenty years and upwards, I have not observed any that have

extended the time to thirty hours. In the unity of place they are full

as scrupulous; for many of their critics limit it to that very spot of

ground where the play is supposed to begin; none of them exceed the

compass of the same town or city.

The unity of action in all their plays is yet more conspicuous; for

they do not burden them with under-plots, as the English do: which is

the reason why many scenes of our tragi-comedies carry on a design

that is nothing of kin to the main plot; and that we see two distinct

webs in a play, like those in ill-wrought stuffs; and two actions,

that is, two plays, carried on together, to the confounding of the

audience; who, before they are warm in their concernments for one part,

are diverted to another; and by that means espouse the interest of

neither. From hence likewise it arises, that the one half of our actors

are not known to the other. They keep their distances, as if they were

Montagues and Capulets, and seldom begin an acquaintance till the last

scene of the fifth act, when they are all to meet upon the stage. There

is no theatre in the world has any thing so absurd as the English

tragi-comedy; it is a drama of our own invention, and the fashion of

it is enough to proclaim it so; here a course of mirth, there another

of sadness and passion, and a third of honour and a duel: thus, in two

hours and a half we run through all the fits of Bedlam. The French

affords you as much variety on the same day, but they do it not so

unseasonably, or _mal à propos_, as we: our poets present you the play

and the farce together; and our stages still retain somewhat of the

original civility of the Red Bull:[126]

_Atque ursum et pugiles media inter carmina poscunt_.

The end of tragedies or serious plays, says Aristotle, is to beget

admiration, compassion, or concernment; but are not mirth and

compassion things incompatible? and is it not evident, that the poet

must of necessity destroy the former by intermingling of the latter?

that is, he must ruin the sole end and object of his tragedy, to

introduce somewhat that is forced into it, and is not of the body of

it. Would you not think that physician mad, who, having prescribed a

purge, should immediately order you to take restringents?

But to leave our plays, and return to theirs. I have noted one great

advantage they have had in the plotting of their tragedies; that is,

they are always grounded upon some known history: according to that

of Horace, _Ex noto fictum carmen sequar_; and in that they have so

imitated the ancients, that they have surpassed them. For the ancients,

as was observed before, took for the foundation of their plays some

poetical fiction, such as under that consideration could move but

little concernment in the audience, because they already knew the event

of it. But the French goes farther:

_Atque ita mentitur, sic veris falsa remiscet,

Primo ne medium, medio ne discrepet imum_.

He so interweaves truth with probable fiction, that he puts a pleasing

fallacy upon us, mends the intrigues of fate, and dispenses with the

severity of history, to reward that virtue which has been rendered

to us there unfortunate. Sometimes the story has left the success so

doubtful, that the writer is free, by the privilege of a poet, to take

that which of two or more relations will best suit with his design:

as for example, in the death of Cyrus, whom Justin and some others

report to have perished in the Scythian war, but Xenophon affirms to

have died in his bed of extreme old age. Nay more, when the event is

past dispute, even then we are willing to be deceived, and the poet,

if he contrives it with appearance of truth, has all the audience of

his party; at least during the time his play is acting: so naturally we

are kind to virtue, when our own interest is not in question, that we

take it up as the general concernment of mankind. On the other side,

if you consider the historical plays of Shakespeare, they are rather

so many chronicles of kings, or the business many times of thirty or

forty years, cramped into a representation of two hours and a half;

which is not to imitate or paint nature, but rather to draw her in

miniature, to take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong

end of a perspective, and receive her images not only much less, but

infinitely more imperfect than the life: this, instead of making a play

delightful, renders it ridiculous:

_Quodcunque ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi_.

For the spirit of man cannot be satisfied but with truth, or at

least verisimility; and a poem is to contain, if not τὰ ἐτυμα,

yet ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα, as one of the Greek poets has expressed it.

Another thing in which the French differ from us and from the

Spaniards, is, that they do not embarrass, or cumber themselves

with too much plot; they only represent so much of a story as will

constitute one whole and great action sufficient for a play: we, who

undertake more, do but multiply adventures; which, not being produced

from one another, as effects from causes, but barely following,

constitute many actions in the drama, and consequently make it many

plays.

But by pursuing closely one argument, which is not cloyed with many

turns, the French have gained more liberty for verse, in which they

write: they have leisure to dwell on a subject which deserves it;

and to represent the passions, (which we have acknowledged to be the

poet's work,) without being hurried from one thing to another, as

we are in the plays of Calderon, which we have seen lately upon our

theatres, under the name of Spanish plots. I have taken notice but of

one tragedy of ours, whose plot has that uniformity and unity of design

in it, which I have commended in the French; and that is "Rollo,"[127]

or rather, under the name of Rollo, the story of Bassianus and Geta

in Herodian: there indeed the plot is neither large nor intricate,

but just enough to fill the minds of the audience, not to cloy them.

Besides, you see it founded upon the truth of history,--only the time

of the action is not reduceable to the strictness of the rules; and you

see in some places a little farce mingled, which is below the dignity

of the other parts; and in this all our poets are extremely peccant:

even Ben Jonson himself, in "Sejanus" and "Catiline," has given us this

olio of a play, this unnatural mixture of comedy and tragedy, which

to me sounds just as ridiculously as the history of David with the

merry humours of Goliah. In "Sejanus" you may take notice of the scene

betwixt Livia and the physician, which is a pleasant satire upon the

artificial helps of beauty: in "Catiline" you may see the parliament of

women; the little envies of them to one another; and all that passes

betwixt Curio and Fulvia: scenes admirable in their kind, but of an ill

mingle with the rest.

But I return again to the French writers, who, as I have said, do not

burden themselves too much with plot, which has been reproached to them

by an ingenious person of our nation[128] as a fault; for he says,

they commonly make but one person considerable in a play; they dwell

on him, and his concernments, while the rest of the persons are only

subservient to set him off. If he intends this by it,--that there is

one person in the play who is of greater dignity than the rest, he must

tax, not only theirs, but those of the ancients, and, which he would

be loth to do, the best of ours; for it is impossible but that one

person must be more conspicuous in it than any other, and consequently

the greatest share in the action must devolve on him. We see it so in

the management of all affairs; even in the most equal aristocracy, the

balance cannot be so justly poised, but some one will be superior to

the rest, either in parts, fortune, interest, or the consideration of

some glorious exploit; which will reduce the greatest part of business

into his hands.

But, if he would have us to imagine, that in exalting one character the

rest of them are neglected, and that all of them have not some share

or other in the action of the play, I desire him to produce any of

Corneille's tragedies, wherein every person (like so many servants in a

well-governed family) has not some employment, and who is not necessary

to the carrying on of the plot, or at least to your understanding it.

There are indeed some protatic persons in the ancients, whom they make

use of in their plays, either to hear, or give the relation: but the

French avoid this with great address, making their narrations only

to, or by such, who are some way interested in the main design. And

now I am speaking of relations, I cannot take a fitter opportunity

to add this in favour of the French, that they often use them with

better judgment and more _á propos_ than the English do. Not that I

commend narrations in general,--but there are two sorts of them; one,

of those things which are antecedent to the play, and are related to

make the conduct of it more clear to us; but it is a fault to chuse

such subjects for the stage as will force us on that rock, because

we see they are seldom listened to by the audience, and that is many

times the ruin of the play; for, being once let pass without attention,

the audience can never recover themselves to understand the plot; and

indeed it is somewhat unreasonable, that they should be put to so much

trouble, as, that to comprehend what passes in their sight, they must

have recourse to what was done, perhaps, ten or twenty years ago.

But there is another sort of relations, that is, of things happening in

the action of the play, and supposed to be done behind the scenes; and

this is many times both convenient and beautiful: for, by it the French

avoid the tumult to which we are subject in England, by representing

duels, battles, and the like; which renders our stage too like the

theatres where they fight prizes. For what is more ridiculous than to

represent an army with a drum and five men behind it; all which, the

hero of the other side is to drive in before him? or to see a duel

fought, and one slain with two or three thrusts of the foils, which we

know are so blunted, that we might give a man an hour to kill another

in good earnest with them?

I have observed, that in all our tragedies the audience cannot forbear

laughing when the actors are to die; it is the most comic part of the

whole play. All passions may be lively represented on the stage, if

to the well-writing of them the actor supplies a good commanded voice,

and limbs that move easily, and without stiffness; but there are many

actions which can never be imitated to a just height: dying especially

is a thing which none but a Roman gladiator could naturally perform

on the stage, when he did not imitate, or represent, but do it; and

therefore it is better to omit the representation of it.

The words of a good writer, which describe it lively, will make a

deeper impression of belief in us, than all the actor can insinuate

into us, when he seems to fall dead before us; as a poet in the

description of a beautiful garden, or a meadow, will please our

imagination more than the place itself can please our sight. When we

see death represented, we are convinced it is but fiction; but when we

hear it related, our eyes (the strongest witnesses) are wanting, which

might have undeceived us; and we are all willing to favour the slight

when the poet does not too grossly impose on us. They, therefore, who

imagine these relations would make no concernment in the audience,

are deceived, by confounding them with the other, which are of things

antecedent to the play: those are made often in cold blood, as I may

say, to the audience; but these are warmed with our concernments,

which were before awakened in the play. What the philosophers say of

motion, that, when it is once begun, it continues of itself, and will

do so to eternity, without some stop put to it, is clearly true on

this occasion: the soul, being already moved with the characters and

fortunes of those imaginary persons, continues going of its own accord;

and we are no more weary to hear what becomes of them when they are not

on the stage, than we are to listen to the news of an absent mistress.

But it is objected, that if one part of the play may be related, then

why not all? I answer, some parts of the action are more fit to be

represented, some to be related. Corneille says judiciously, that the

poet is not obliged to expose to view all particular actions which

conduce to the principal: he ought to select such of them to be seen,

which will appear with the greatest beauty, either by the magnificence

of the show, or the vehemence of passions which they produce, or some

other charm which they have in them, and let the rest arrive to the

audience by narration. It is a great mistake in us to believe the

French present no part of the action on the stage: every alteration or

crossing of a design, every new-sprung passion, and turn of it, is a

part of the action, and much the noblest, except we conceive nothing

to be action till the players come to blows; as if the painting of the

hero's mind were not more properly the poet's work, than the strength

of his body. Nor does this any thing contradict the opinion of Horace,

where he tells us,

_Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem,

Quam quæ sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus_.

For he says immediately after,

------------_Non tamen intus

Digna geri promes in scenam_; multaq; _tolles

Ex oculis, quæ mox narret facundia præsens_.

Among which many he recounts some:

_Nec pueros coram populo Medea trucidet,

Aut in avem Progne mutetur, Cadmus in anguem_, &c.

That is, those actions which by reason of their cruelty will cause

aversion in us, or by reason of their impossibility, unbelief, ought

either wholly to be avoided by a poet, or only delivered by narration.

To which we may have leave to add such as, to avoid tumult, (as was

before hinted,) or to reduce the plot into a more reasonable compass of

time, or for defect of beauty in them, are rather to be related than

presented to the eye. Examples of all these kinds are frequent, not

only among all the ancients, but in the best received of our English

poets. We find Ben Jonson using them in his "Magnetic Lady," where one

comes out from dinner, and relates the quarrels and disorders of it to

save the undecent appearance of them on the stage, and to abbreviate

the story: and this in express imitation of Terence, who had done the

same before him in his "Eunuch," where Pythias makes the like relation

of what had happened within at the Soldier's entertainment. The

relations, likewise, of Sejanus's death, and the prodigies before it,

are remarkable; the one of which was hid from sight to avoid the horror

and tumult of the representation; the other, to shun the introducing

of things impossible to be believed. In that excellent play, "The King

and no King," Fletcher goes yet farther; for the whole unravelling of

the plot is done by narration in the fifth act, after the manner of

the ancients; and it moves great concernment in the audience, though

it be only a relation of what was done many years before the play. I

could multiply other instances, but these are sufficient to prove, that

there is no error in chusing a subject which requires this sort of

narrations; in the ill management of them, there may.

But I find I have been too long in this discourse, since the French

have many other excellencies not common to us; as that you never see

any of their plays end with a conversion, or simple change of will,

which is the ordinary way which our poets use to end theirs. It shews

little art in the conclusion of a dramatic poem, when they who have

hindered the felicity during the four acts, desist from it in the

fifth, without some powerful cause to take them off their design; and

though I deny not but such reasons may be found, yet it is a path that

is cautiously to be trod, and the poet is to be sure he convinces the

audience, that the motive is strong enough.[129] As for example, the

conversion of the Usurer in "The Scornful Lady," seems to me a little

forced; for, being an usurer, which implies a lover of money to the

highest degree of covetousness, (and such the poet has represented

him,) the account he gives for the sudden change is, that he has been

duped by the wild young fellow; which in reason might render him more

wary another time, and make him punish himself with harder fare and

coarser clothes to get up again what he had lost: but that he should

look on it as a judgment, and so repent, we may expect to hear in a

sermon, but I should never endure it in a play.

I pass by this; neither will I insist on the care they take, that no

person after his first entrance shall ever appear, but the business

which brings him upon the stage shall be evident; which rule, if

observed, must needs render all the events in the play more natural;

for there you see the probability of every accident, in the cause that

produced it; and that which appears chance in the play, will seem so

reasonable to you, that you will there find it almost necessary: so

that in the exit of the actor you have a clear account of his purpose

and design in the next entrance; (though, if the scene be well wrought,

the event will commonly deceive you;) for there is nothing so absurd,

says Corneille, as for an actor to leave the stage, only because he has

no more to say.

I should now speak of the beauty of their rhyme, and the just reason

I have to prefer that way of writing in tragedies before ours in

blank-verse; but because it is partly received by us, and therefore not

altogether peculiar to them, I will say no more of it in relation to

their plays. For our own, I doubt not but it will exceedingly beautify

them; and I can see but one reason why it should not generally obtain,

that is, because our poets write so ill in it. This indeed may prove

a more prevailing argument than all others which are used to destroy

it, and therefore I am only troubled when great and judicious poets,

and those who are acknowledged such, have writ or spoke against it: as

for others, they are to be answered by that one sentence of an ancient

author:[130] _Sed ut primo ad consequendos eos quos priores ducimus,

accendimur, ita ubi aut præteriri, aut æquari eos posse desperavimus,

studium cum spe senescit: quod, scilicet, assequi non potest, sequi

desinit;--prœteritoque eo in quo eminere non possumus, aliquid in

quo nitamur, conquirimus_.

Lisideius concluded in this manner; and Neander, after a little pause,

thus answered him:

I shall grant Lisideius, without much dispute, a great part of what he

has urged against us; for I acknowledge, that the French contrive their

plots more regularly, and observe the laws of comedy, and decorum of

the stage, (to speak generally,) with more exactness than the English.

Farther, I deny not but he has taxed us justly in some irregularities

of ours, which he has mentioned; yet, after all, I am of opinion, that

neither our faults, nor their virtues, are considerable enough to place

them above us.

For the lively imitation of nature being in the definition of a play,

those which best fulfil that law, ought to be esteemed superior to

the others. 'Tis true, those beauties of the French poesy are such as

will raise perfection higher where it is, but are not sufficient to

give it where it is not: they are indeed the beauties of a statue,

but not of a man, because not animated with the soul of poesy, which

is imitation of humour and passions: and this Lisideius himself, or

any other, however biassed to their party, cannot but acknowledge, if

he will either compare the humours of our comedies, or the characters

of our serious plays, with theirs. He who will look upon theirs which

have been written till these last ten years, or thereabouts, will find

it an hard matter to pick out two or three passable humours amongst

them. Corneille himself, their arch-poet, what has he produced except

"The Liar," and you know how it was cried up in France; but when it

came upon the English stage, though well translated, and that part

of Dorant acted[131] to so much advantage as I am confident it never

received in its own country, the most favourable to it would not put it

in competition with many of Fletcher's or Ben Jonson's. In the rest of

Corneille's comedies you have little humour; he tells you himself, his

way is, first to shew two lovers in good intelligence with each other;

in the working up of the play, to embroil them by some mistake, and in

the latter end to clear it, and reconcile them.

But of late years Moliere, the younger Corneille, Quinault, and some

others, have been imitating afar off the quick turns and graces of the

English stage. They have mixed their serious plays with mirth, like

our tragi-comedies, since the death of Cardinal Richelieu,[132] which

Lisideius, and many others, not observing, have commended that in them

for a virtue, which they themselves no longer practise. Most of their

new plays are, like some of ours, derived from the Spanish novels.

There is scarce one of them without a veil, and a trusty Diego, who

drolls much after the rate of the "Adventures."[133] But their humours,

if I may grace them with that name, are so thin sown, that never above

one of them comes up in any play. I dare take upon me to find more

variety of them in some one play of Ben Jonson's, than in all theirs

together: as he who has seen the "Alchemist," "The Silent Woman," or

"Bartholomew Fair," cannot but acknowledge with me.

I grant the French have performed what was possible on the ground-work

of the Spanish plays; what was pleasant before, they have made

regular: but there is not above one good play to be writ on all those

plots; they are too much alike to please often, which we need not

the experience of our own stage to justify. As for their new way of

mingling mirth with serious plot, I do not, with Lisideius, condemn

the thing, though I cannot approve their manner of doing it. He tells

us, we cannot so speedily recollect ourselves after a scene of great

passion and concernment, as to pass to another of mirth and humour, and

to enjoy it with any relish: but why should he imagine the soul of man

more heavy than his senses? Does not the eye pass from an unpleasant

object to a pleasant, in a much shorter time than is required to

this? and does not the unpleasantness of the first commend the beauty

of the latter? The old rule of logic might have convinced him, that

contraries, when placed near, set off each other. A continued gravity

keeps the spirit too much bent; we must refresh it sometimes, as we

bait in a journey, that we may go on with greater ease. A scene of

mirth, mixed with tragedy, has the same effect upon us which our music

has betwixt the acts; which we find a relief to us from the best plots

and language of the stage, if the discourses have been long. I must

therefore have stronger arguments, ere I am convinced that compassion

and mirth in the same subject destroy each other; and in the mean

time, cannot but conclude, to the honour of our nation, that we have

invented, increased, and perfected, a more pleasant way of writing

for the stage, than was ever known to the ancients or moderns of any

nation, which is tragi-comedy.

And this leads me to wonder why Lisideius and many others should

cry up the barrenness of the French plots, above the variety and

copiousness of the English. Their plots are single, they carry on one

design, which is pushed forward by all the actors, every scene in the

play contributing and moving towards it. Our plays, besides the main

design, have under-plots, or by-concernments, of less considerable

persons and intrigues, which are carried on with the motion of the

main plot: as they say the orb of the fixed stars, and those of the

planets, though they have motions of their own, are whirled about by

the motion of the _primum mobile_, in which they are contained. That

similitude expresses much of the English stage; for if contrary motions

may be found in nature to agree; if a planet can go east and west at

the same time;--one way by virtue of his own motion, the other by the

force of the first mover;--it will not be difficult to imagine how the

under-plot, which is only different, not contrary to the great design,

may naturally be conducted along with it.

Eugenius has already shewn us, from the confession of the French

poets, that the unity of action is sufficiently preserved, if all the

imperfect actions of the play are conducing to the main design; but

when those petty intrigues of a play are so ill ordered, that they

have no coherence with the other, I must grant that Lisideius has

reason to tax that want of due connection; for co-ordination in a

play is as dangerous and unnatural as in a state. In the mean time he

must acknowledge, our variety, if well ordered, will afford a greater

pleasure to the audience.

As for his other argument, that by pursuing one single theme they gain

an advantage to express and work up the passions, I wish any example he

could bring from them would make it good; for I confess their verses

are to me the coldest I have ever read. Neither, indeed, is it possible

for them, in the way they take, so to express passion, as that the

effects of it should appear in the concernment of an audience, their

speeches being so many declamations, which tire us with the length; so

that instead of persuading us to grieve for their imaginary heroes,

we are concerned for our own trouble, as we are in tedious visits of

bad company; we are in pain till they are gone. When the French stage

came to be reformed by Cardinal Richelieu, those long harangues were

introduced, to comply with the gravity of a churchman. Look upon the

"Cinna" and the "Pompey;" they are not so properly to be called plays,

as long discourses of reason of state; and "Polieucte" in matters

of religion is as solemn as the long stops upon our organs. Since

that time it is grown into a custom, and their actors speak by the

hour-glass, like our parsons;[134] nay, they account it the grace of

their parts, and think themselves disparaged by the poet, if they may

not twice or thrice in a play entertain the audience with a speech of

an hundred lines. I deny not but this may suit well enough with the

French; for as we, who are a more sullen people, come to be diverted

at our plays, so they, who are of an airy and gay temper, come thither

to make themselves more serious: and this I conceive to be one reason,

why comedies are more pleasing to us, and tragedies to them. But to

speak generally: it cannot be denied, that short speeches and replies

are more apt to move the passions, and beget concernment in us, than

the other; for it is unnatural for any one, in a gust of passion, to

speak long together; or for another, in the same condition, to suffer

him without interruption. Grief and passion are like floods raised

in little brooks by a sudden rain; they are quickly up, and if the

concernment be poured unexpectedly in upon us, it overflows us: But

a long sober shower gives them leisure to run out as they came in,

without troubling the ordinary current. As for comedy, repartee is one

of its chiefest graces; the greatest pleasure of the audience is a

chace of wit, kept up on both sides, and swiftly managed. And this our

forefathers, if not we, have had in Fletcher's plays, to a much higher

degree of perfection, than the French poets can reasonably hope to

reach.

There is another part of Lisideius's discourse, in which he has rather

excused our neighbours, than commended them; that is, for aiming only

to make one person considerable in their plays. It is very true what

he has urged, that one character in all plays, even without the poet's

care, will have advantage of all the others; and that the design of

the whole drama will chiefly depend on it. But this hinders not that

there may be more shining characters in the play: many persons of a

second magnitude, nay, some so very near, so almost equal to the first,

that greatness may be opposed to greatness, and all the persons be

made considerable, not only by their quality, but their action. It is

evident, that the more the persons are, the greater will be the variety

of the plot. If then the parts are managed so regularly, that the

beauty of the whole be kept entire, and that the variety become not a

perplexed and confused mass of accidents, you will find it infinitely

pleasing to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your

way before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it. And that

all this is practicable, I can produce for examples many of our English

plays: As "The Maid's Tragedy," "The Alchemist," "The Silent Woman:" I

was going to have named "The Fox," but that the unity of design seems

not exactly observed in it; for there appear two actions in the play;

the first naturally ending with the fourth act, the second forced from

it in the fifth: which yet is the less to be condemned in him, because

the disguise of Volpone, though it suited not with his character

as a crafty or covetous person, agreed well enough with that of a

voluptuary;[135] and by it the poet gained the end at which he aimed,

the punishment of vice, and the reward of virtue, both which that

disguise produced. So that to judge equally of it, it was an excellent

fifth act, but not so naturally proceeding from the former.

But to leave this, and pass to the latter part of Lisideius's

discourse, which concerns relations, I must acknowledge with him, that

the French have reason to hide that part of the action which would

occasion too much tumult on the stage, and to chuse rather to have

it made known by narration to the audience. Farther, I think it very

convenient, for the reasons he has given, that all incredible actions

were removed; but, whether custom has so insinuated itself into our

countrymen, or nature has so formed them to fierceness, I know not;

but they will scarcely suffer combats and other objects of horror to

be taken from them. And indeed, the indecency of tumults is all which

can be objected against fighting: for why may not our imagination as

well suffer itself to be deluded with the probability of it, as with

any other thing in the play? For my part, I can with as great ease

persuade myself, that the blows are given in good earnest, as I can,

that they who strike them are kings or princes, or those persons which

they represent. For objects of incredibility,--I would be satisfied

from Lisideius, whether we have any so removed from all appearance of

truth, as are those of Corneille's "Andromede;" a play which has been

frequented the most of any he has writ. If the Perseus, or the son of

an heathen god, the Pegasus, and the Monster, were not capable to choke

a strong belief, let him blame any representation of ours hereafter.

Those indeed were objects of delight; yet the reason is the same as to

the probability; for he makes it not a ballet, or masque, but a play,

which is to resemble truth. But for death, that it ought not to be

represented, I have, besides the arguments alleged by Lisideius, the

authority of Ben Jonson, who has forborne it in his tragedies; for both

the death of Sejanus and Catiline are related; though, in the latter, I

cannot but observe one irregularity of that great poet; he has removed

the scene in the same act, from Rome to Catiline's army, and from

thence again to Rome; and besides, has allowed a very considerable time

after Catiline's speech, for the striking of the battle, and the return

of Petreius, who is to relate the event of it to the senate; which I

should not animadvert on him, who was otherwise a painful observer of

τὸ πρεπὸν, or the _decorum_ of the stage, if he had not used

extreme severity in his judgment on the incomparable Shakespeare for

the same fault.[136] To conclude on this subject of relations, if we

are to be blamed for shewing too much of the action, the French are as

faulty for discovering too little of it; a mean betwixt both should

be observed by every judicious writer, so as the audience may neither

be left unsatisfied by not seeing what is beautiful, or shocked by

beholding what is either incredible or undecent.

I hope I have already proved in this discourse, that though we are

not altogether so punctual as the French, in observing the laws of

comedy, yet our errors are so few, and little, and those things

wherein we excel them so considerable, that we ought of right to be

preferred before them. But what will Lisideius say, if they themselves

acknowledge they are too strictly bounded by those laws, for breaking

which he has blamed the English? I will allege Corneille's words, as

I find them in the end of his Discourse of the three Unities: _Il

est facile aux speculatifs d'estre severes_, &c. "It is easy for

speculative persons to judge severely; but if they would produce to

public view ten or twelve pieces of this nature, they would perhaps

give more latitude to the rules than I have done, when, by experience,

they had known how much we are limited and constrained by them, and

how many beauties of the stage they banished from it." To illustrate a

little what he has said:--by their servile observations of the unities

of time and place, and integrity of scenes, they have brought on

themselves that dearth of plot, and narrowness of imagination, which

may be observed in all their plays. How many beautiful accidents might

naturally happen in two or three days, which cannot arrive with any

probability in the compass of twenty-four hours? There is time to be

allowed also for maturity of design, which amongst great and prudent

persons, such as are often represented in tragedy, cannot, with any

likelihood of truth, be brought to pass at so short a warning. Farther,

by tying themselves strictly to the unity of place, and unbroken

scenes, they are forced many times to omit some beauties which cannot

be shewn where the act began; but might, if the scene were interrupted,

and the stage cleared for the persons to enter in another place; and

therefore the French poets are often forced upon absurdities: for if

the act begins in a chamber, all the persons in the play must have some

business or other to come thither, or else they are not to be shewn

that act; and sometimes their characters are very unfitting to appear

there: as suppose it were the king's bed-chamber, yet the meanest man

in the tragedy must come and dispatch his business there, rather than

in the lobby, or court-yard, (which is fitter for him,) for fear the

stage should be cleared, and the scenes broken. Many times they fall by

it into a greater inconvenience; for they keep their scenes unbroken,

and yet change the place; as in one of their newest plays, where the

act begins in the street. There a gentleman is to meet his friend; he

sees him with his man, coming out from his father's house; they talk

together, and the first goes out: the second, who is a lover, has made

an appointment with his mistress; she appears at the window, and then

we are to imagine the scene lies under it. This gentleman is called

away, and leaves his servant with his mistress: presently her father is

heard from within; the young lady is afraid the serving-man should be

discovered, and thrusts him into a place of safety, which is supposed

to be her closet. After this, the father enters to the daughter, and

now the scene is in a house: for he is seeking from one room to another

for this poor Philipin, or French Diego, who is heard from within,

drolling and breaking many a miserable conceit on the subject of his

sad condition. In this ridiculous manner the play goes forward, the

stage being never empty all the while: so that the street, the window,

the two houses, and the closet, are made to walk about, and the persons

to stand still. Now, what, I beseech you, is more easy than to write

a regular French play, or more difficult than to write an irregular

English one, like those of Fletcher, or of Shakespeare?

If they content themselves, as Corneille did, with some flat design,

which, like an ill riddle, is found out ere it be half proposed, such

plots we can make every way regular as easily as they; but whenever

they endeavour to rise to any quick turns and counter-turns of plot,

as some of them have attempted, since Corneille's plays have been less

in vogue, you see they write as irregularly as we, though they cover

it more speciously. Hence the reason is perspicuous, why no French

plays, when translated, have, or ever can succeed on the English stage.

For, if you consider the plots, our own are fuller of variety; if the

writing, ours are more quick and fuller of spirit; and therefore 'tis a

strange mistake in those who decry the way of writing plays in verse,

as if the English therein imitated the French. We have borrowed nothing

from them; our plots are weaved in English looms: we endeavour therein

to follow the variety and greatness of characters, which are derived

to us from Shakespeare and Fletcher; the copiousness and well-knitting

of the intrigues we have from Jonson; and for the verse itself we have

English precedents of elder date than any of Corneille's plays. Not to

name our old comedies before Shakespeare, which were all writ in verse

of six feet, or Alexandrines, such as the French now use,--[137] I can

shew in Shakespeare, many scenes of rhyme together, and the like in

Ben Jonson's tragedies: in "Catiline" and "Sejanus" sometimes thirty

or forty lines,--I mean besides the chorus, or the monologues; which,

by the way, shewed Ben no enemy to this way of writing, especially if

you read his "Sad Shepherd," which goes sometimes on rhyme, sometimes

on blank verse, like an horse who eases himself on trot and amble.

You find him likewise commending Fletcher's pastoral of "The Faithful

Shepherdess," which is for the most part rhyme, though not refined to

that purity to which it hath since been brought. And these examples are

enough to clear us from a servile imitation of the French.

But to return whence I have digressed: I dare boldly affirm these two

things of the English drama;--First, that we have many plays of ours

as regular as any of theirs, and which, besides, have more variety

of plot and characters; and, secondly, that in most of the irregular

plays of Shakespeare or Fletcher, (for Ben Jonson's are for the most

part regular,) there is a more masculine fancy, and greater spirit in

the writing, than there is in any of the French. I could produce even

in Shakespeare's and Fletcher's works, some plays which are almost

exactly formed; as the "Merry Wives of Windsor," and "The Scornful

Lady:" but, because (generally speaking) Shakespeare, who writ first,

did not perfectly observe the laws of comedy, and Fletcher, who came

nearer to perfection, yet through carelessness made many faults; I will

take the pattern of a perfect play from Ben Jonson, who was a careful

and learned observer of the dramatic laws, and from all his comedies I

shall select "The Silent Woman;" of which I will make a short examen,

according to those rules which the French observe.

As Neander was beginning to examine "The Silent Woman," Eugenius,

earnestly regarding him; I beseech you, Neander, said he, gratify the

company, and me in particular, so far as, before you speak of the play,

to give us a character of the author; and tell us frankly your opinion,

whether you do not think all writers, both French and English, ought to

give place to him?

I fear, replied Neander, that, in obeying your commands, I shall draw

some envy on myself. Besides, in performing them, it will be first

necessary to speak somewhat of Shakespeare and Fletcher, his rivals in

poesy; and one of them, in my opinion, at least his equal, perhaps his

superior.[138]

To begin then with Shakespeare. He was the man who of all modern, and

perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All

the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not

laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than

see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning,

give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed

not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and

found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I

should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is

many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his

serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great

occasion is presented to him: no man can say, he ever had a fit subject

for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of

poets,

_Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi_.

The consideration of this made Mr Hales of Eton[139] say, that there

was no subject of which any poet ever writ, but he would produce

it much better done in Shakespeare; and however others are now

generally preferred before him, yet the age wherein he lived, which

had contemporaries with him, Fletcher and Jonson, never equalled them

to him in their esteem: and in the last king's court, when Ben's

reputation was at highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the greater

part of the courtiers, set our Shakespeare far above him.

Beaumont and Fletcher, of whom I am next to speak, had, with the

advantage of Shakespeare's wit, which was their precedent, great

natural gifts, improved by study; Beaumont especially being so

accurate a judge of plays, that Ben Jonson, while he lived, submitted

all his writings to his censure, and 'tis thought, used his judgment

in correcting, if not contriving, all his plots. What value he had

for him, appears by the verses he writ to him; and therefore I need

speak no farther of it. The first play that brought Fletcher and him

in esteem, was their "Philaster;" for before that, they had written

two or three very unsuccessfully: as the like is reported of Ben

Jonson, before he writ "Every Man in his Humour." Their plots were

generally more regular than Shakespeare's, especially those which

were made before Beaumont's death; and they understood and imitated

the conversation of gentlemen much better; whose wild debaucheries,

and quickness of wit in repartees, no poet before them could paint as

they have done. Humour,[140] which Ben Jonson derived from particular

persons, they made it not their business to describe: they represented

all the passions very lively, but above all, love. I am apt to believe

the English language in them arrived to its highest perfection; what

words have since been taken in, are rather superfluous than ornamental.

Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments

of the stage; two of theirs being acted through the year for one of

Shakespeare's or Jonson's: the reason is, because there is a certain

gaiety in their comedies, and pathos in their more serious plays,

which suits generally with all men's humours. Shakespeare's language is

likewise a little obsolete, and Ben Jonson's wit comes short of theirs.

As for Jonson, to whose character I am now arrived, if we look upon

him while he was himself, (for his last plays were but his dotages,)

I think him the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre

ever had. He was a most severe judge of himself, as well as others.

One cannot say he wanted wit, but rather that he was frugal of it. In

his works you find little to retrench or alter. Wit and language, and

humour also in some measure, we had before him; but something of art

was wanting to the drama, till he came. He managed his strength to

more advantage than any who preceded him. You seldom find him making

love in any of his scenes, or endeavouring to move the passions; his

genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially

when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such an

height. Humour was his proper sphere; and in that he delighted most to

represent mechanic people. He was deeply conversant in the ancients,

both Greek and Latin, and he borrowed boldly from them: there is scarce

a poet or historian among the Roman authors of those times, whom he

has not translated in "Sejanus" and "Catiline." But he has done his

robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any

law. He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in

other poets, is only victory in him. With the spoils of these writers

he so represents old Rome to us, in its rites, ceremonies, and customs,

that if one of their poets had written either of his tragedies, we had

seen less of it than in him. If there was any fault in his language, it

was, that he weaved it too closely and laboriously, in his comedies

especially: perhaps too, he did a little too much Romanize our tongue,

leaving the words which he translated almost as much Latin as he

found them: wherein, though he learnedly followed their language, he

did not enough comply with the idiom of ours. If I would compare him

with Shakespeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct poet, but

Shakespeare the greater wit.[141] Shakespeare was the Homer, or father

of our dramatic poets; Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate

writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare. To conclude of him; as

he has given us the most correct plays, so in the precepts which he has

laid down in his "Discoveries," we have as many and profitable rules

for perfecting the stage, as any wherewith the French can furnish us.

Having thus spoken of the author, I proceed to the examination of his

comedy, "The Silent Woman."

_Examen of "The Silent Woman."_

To begin first with the length of the action; it is so far from

exceeding the compass of a natural day, that it takes not up an

artificial one. It is all included in the limits of three hours and

an half, which is no more than is required for the presentment on

the stage: a beauty perhaps not much observed; if it had, we should

not have looked on the Spanish translation of "Five Hours" with so

much wonder. The scene of it is laid in London; the latitude of place

is almost as little as you can imagine; for it lies all within the

compass of two houses, and after the first act, in one. The continuity

of scenes is observed more than in any of our plays, except his own

"Fox" and "Alchemist." They are not broken above twice, or thrice

at most, in the whole comedy; and in the two best of Corneille's

plays, the "Cid" and "Cinna," they are interrupted once. The action

of the play is entirely one; the end or aim of which is the settling

Morose's estate on Dauphine. The intrigue of it is the greatest and

most noble of any pure unmixed comedy in any language: you see in it

many persons of various characters and humours, and all delightful. As

first, Morose, or an old man, to whom all noise, but his own talking,

is offensive. Some, who would be thought critics, say this humour of

his is forced: but to remove that objection, we may consider him first

to be naturally of a delicate hearing, as many are to whom all sharp

sounds are unpleasant; and secondly, we may attribute much of it to

the peevishness of his age, or the wayward authority of an old man in

his own house, where he may make himself obeyed; and to this the poet

seems to allude in his name Morose. Beside this, I am assured from

divers persons, that Ben Jonson was actually acquainted with such a

man, one altogether as ridiculous as he is here represented. Others

say, it is not enough to find one man of such an humour; it must be

common to more, and the more common the more natural. To prove this,

they instance in the best of comical characters, Falstaff. There are

many men resembling him; old, fat, merry, cowardly, drunken, amorous,

vain, and lying. But to convince these people, I need but tell them,

that humour is the ridiculous extravagance of conversation, wherein

one man differs from all others. If then it be common, or communicated

to many, how differs it from other men's? or what indeed causes it to

be ridiculous so much as the singularity of it? As for Falstaff, he

is not properly one humour, but a miscellany of humours or images,

drawn from so many several men: that wherein he is singular is his wit,

or those things he says, _prœter expectatum_, unexpected by the

audience; his quick evasions, when you imagine him surprised, which, as

they are extremely diverting of themselves, so receive a great addition

from his person; for the very sight of such an unwieldy old debauched

fellow is a comedy alone. And here, having a place so proper for it,

I cannot but enlarge somewhat upon this subject of humour into which

I am fallen. The ancients had little of it in their comedies; for the

τὸ γελοῖον of the old comedy, of which Aristophanes was

chief, was not so much to imitate a man, as to make the people laugh at

some odd conceit, which had commonly somewhat of unnatural or obscene

in it. Thus, when you see Socrates brought upon the stage, you are not

to imagine him made ridiculous by the imitation of his actions, but

rather by making him perform something very unlike himself: something

so childish and absurd, as by comparing it with the gravity of the true

Socrates, makes a ridiculous object for the spectators. In their new

comedy which succeeded, the poets sought indeed to express the ἦθος,

as in their tragedies the πάθος of mankind. But this ἦθος

contained only the general characters of men and manners; as old men,

lovers, serving-men, courtezans, parasites, and such other persons as

we see in their comedies; all which they made alike: that is, one old

man or father, one lover, one courtezan, so like another, as if the

first of them had begot the rest of every sort: _Ex homine hunc natum

dicas_. The same custom they observed likewise in their tragedies. As

for the French, though they have the word _humeur_ among them, yet they

have small use of it in their comedies, or farces; they being but ill

imitations of the _ridiculum_, or that which stirred up laughter in

the old comedy. But among the English 'tis otherwise: where, by humour

is meant some extravagant habit, passion, or affection, particular

(as I said before) to some one person, by the oddness of which, he is

immediately distinguished from the rest of men; which being lively and

naturally represented, most frequently begets that malicious pleasure

in the audience which is testified by laughter; as all things which are

deviations from customs are ever the aptest to produce it: though by

the way this laughter is only accidental, as the person represented is

fantastic or bizarre; but pleasure is essential to it, as the imitation

of what is natural. The description of these humours, drawn from the

knowledge and observation of particular persons, was the peculiar

genius and talent of Ben Jonson; to whose play I now return.