* * * * *
Minor Notes.
_Note by Warton on Aristotle's "Poetics."_--Some of your correspondents
having expressed a wish that the MS. remarks of eminent scholars, when met
with by your readers, might be communicated to the world through your
pages, I beg to send you the following observations, signed _J. Warton_,
which I have found on the blank leaf of a copy of Aristotle's _Poetics_
(edit. of Ruddimannos, Edinb. 1731):--
"To attempt to understand poetry without having diligently digested
this treatise, would be as absurd and impossible as to pretend to a
skill in geometry without having studied Euclid. The fourteenth,
fifteenth, and sixteenth chapters, wherein he has pointed out the
properest methods of exciting terror and pity, convince us that he was
intimately acquainted with those objects which most forcibly affect the
heart. The prime excellence of this precious treatise is the scholastic
precision and philosophical clearness with which the subject is
handled, without any address to {607} the passions or imagination. It
is to be lamented that the part of the Poeticks in which he has given
precepts for comedy did not likewise descend to posterity."
A considerable number of notes, in the same handwriting, are also in the
volume.