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DR. JOHNSON'S PREFACE.

THAT praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to excellence paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be ways continued by those, who, being able to add asting to truth, hope for eminence from the herees of paradox; or those, who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willigo hope from posterity what the present age reses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet denied by envy, will be at last bestowed by time. Antiquity, like every other quality that attracts The notice of mankind, has undoubtedly votaries that everence it, not from reason, but from prejudice. Some seem to admire indiscriminately whatever has been long preserved, without considering that time has sometimes co-operated with chance; all perhaps more willing to honour past than present excelkenne: and the mind contemplates genius through the stades of age, as the eye surveys the sun through arificial opacity. The great contention of criticism is to find the faults of the moderns, and the beauties of the ancients. While an author is yet living, we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead, we rate them by his best.

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To works, however, of which the excellence is not absolute and definite, but gradual and comparative; to works not raised upon principles demonstrative and scientific, but appealing wholly to observation and experience, no other test can be applied than gth of duration and continuance of esteem. What mankind have long possessed they have often exained and compared, and if they persist to value the possession, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour. As among the works of nature, no man can properly call a river deep, or a mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains, and many rivers; so in the protations of genius, nothing can be styled excellent til it has been compared with other works of the e kind. Demonstration immediately displays its power, and has nothing to hope or fear from the flux years: but works tentative and experimental must bestimated by their proportion to the general and lective ability of man, as it is discovered in a long succession of endeavours. Of the first building that raised, it might be with certainty determined that it was round or square; but whether it was spacious or lofty must have been referred to time. The Pythagorean scale of numbers was at once discovered to be perfect; but the poems of Homer we know not to transcend the common limits of an intelligence, but by remarking, that nation ates nation, and century after century, has been able ittle more than transpose his incidents, new e bus characters, and paraphrase his sentiments. The reverence due to writings that have long subarises therefore not from any credulous conbot in the superior wisdom of past ages, or persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind, and the consequence of acknowledged and induberande positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most conAnd is best understood.

The pet, of whose works I have undertaken the reso, may now begin to assume the dignity of an

ancient, and claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration. He has long outlived his century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit. Whatever advantages he might once derive from personal allusions, local customs, or temporary opinions, have for many years been lost; and every topic of merriment or motive of sorrow, which the modes of artificial life afforded him, now only obscure the scenes which they once illuminated. The effects of favour and competition are at an end; the tradition of his friendships and his enmities has perished; his works support no opinion with arguments, nor supply any faction with invectives; they can neither indulge vanity, nor gratify malignity; but are read without any other reason than the desire of pleasure, and are therefore praised only as pleasure is obtained; yet, thus unassisted by interest or passion, they have passed through variations of taste and changes of manners, and, as they are devolved from one generation to another, have received new honours at every transmission.

But because human judgment, though it be gradually gaining upon certainty, never becomes infallible; and approbation, though long continued, may yet be only the approbation of prejudice or fashion; it is proper to inquire, by what peculiarities of excellence Shakspeare has gained and kept the favour of his countrymen.

Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregu lar combinations of fanciful invention may delight awhile, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.

Shakspeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakspeare it is commonly a species.

It is from this wide extension of design that so much instruction is derived. It is this which fills the plays of Shakspeare with practical axioms and domestic wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept; and it may be said of Shakspeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence. Yet his real power is not shewn in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenor of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succied

like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.

has assigned; and it may be said, that he has not only shewn human nature as it acts in real exigences, but as it would be found in trials, to which it cannot be exposed.

It will not easily be imagined how much Shakspeare excels in accommodating his sentiments to This therefore is the praise of Shakspeare, that real life, but by comparing him with other authors. his drama is the mirror of life; that he who has It was observed of the ancient schools of declama-mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms tion, that the more diligently they were frequented, which other writers raise up before him, may here be the more was the student disqualified for the world, cured of his delirious ecstacies, by reading human because he found nothing there which he should sentiments in human language; by scenes from ever meet in any other place. The same remark which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the may be applied to every stage but that of Shakspeare. world, and a confessor predict the progress of the The theatre, when it is under any other direction, is passions. peopled by such characters as were never seen, conversing in a language which was never heard, upon topics which will never arise in the commerce of mankind. But the dialogue of this author is often so evidently determined by the incident which produces it, and is pursued with so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection out of common conversation, and common

Occurrences.

Upon every other stage the universal agent is love, by whose power all good and evil is distributed, and every action quickened or retarded. To bring a lover, a lady, and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions of interest, and harass them with violence of desires inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in rapture, and part in agony; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as nothing human ever was distressed to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered, is the business of a modern dramatist. For this, probability is violated, life is misrepresented, and language is depraved. But love is only one of many passions, and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him. He knew, that any other passion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity.

Characters thus ample and general were not easily discriminated and preserved, yet perhaps no poet ever kept his personages more distinct from each other. I will not say with Pope, that every speech may be assigned to the proper speaker, because many speeches there are which have nothing characteristical but, perhaps, though some may be equally adapted to every person, it will be difficult to find any that can be properly transferred from the present possessor to another claimant. The choice is right, when there is reason for choice.

His adherence to general nature has exposed him to the censure of critics, who form their judgments upon narrower principles. Dennis and Rymer think his Romans not sufficiently Roman, and Voltaire censures his kings as not completely royal. Dennis is offended, that Menenius, a senator of Rome, should play the buffoon; and Voltaire perhaps thinks decency violated when the Danish usurper is represented as a drunkard. But Shakspeare always makes nature predominate over accident; and it he preserves the essential character, is not very careful of distinctions superinduced and adventitious. His story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only on men. He knows that Rome, like every other city, had men of all dispositions; and wanting a buffoon, he went into the senate-house for that which the senate-house would certainly have afforded him. He was inclined to shew an usurper and a murderer not only odious, but despicable; he therefore added drunkenness to his other qualities, knowing that kings love wine like other men, and that wine exerts its natural power upon kings. These are the petty cavils of petty minds; a poet overlooks the casual distinction of country and condition, as a painter, satisfied with the figure, neglects the drapery.

The censure which he has incurred by mixing comic and tragic scenes, as it extends to all his works, deserves more consideration. Let the fact be first stated, and then examined.

Shakspeare's plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolic of another and many mischiefs and many benefits are Other dramatists can only gain attention by hy-done and hindered without design. perbolical or aggravated characters, by fabulous and Out of this chaos of mingled purposes and casualunexampled excellence or depravity, as the writers ties, the ancient poets, according to the laws which of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a custom had prescribed, selected some the crimes of giant and a dwarf; and he that should form his ex-men, and some their absurdities; some the momentpectation of human affairs from the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakspeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion; even where the agency is supernatural, the dialogue is level with life. Other writers disguise the most natural passions and most frequent incidents; so that a single writer who attempted both. he who contemplates them in the book will not know Shakspeare has united the powers of exciting them in the world: Shakspeare approximates the re-laughter and sorrow not only in one mind, but in mote, and familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would probably be such as he

ous vicissitudes of life, and some the lighter occur. rences; some the terrors of distress, and some the gaieties of prosperity. Thus rose the two modes of imitation, known by the names of tragedy and comedy, compositions intended to promote different ends by contrary means, and considered as so little allied, that I do not recollect among the Greek or Romans

one composition. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and ludicrous characters, and, in the successive evolutions of the design, sometimes pro

duce seriousness and sorrow, and sometimes levity | dow, without injury to the scheme of the play, though and laughter.

in terms which a modern audience would not easily endure; the character of Polonius is seasonable and useful; and the Gravediggers themselves may be heard with applause.

That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry to instruct Shakspeare engaged in dramatic poetry with the by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey world open before him; the rules of the ancients al the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be were yet known to few; the public judgment was denied, because it includes both in its alternations of unformed; he had no example of such fame as might exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the force him upon imitation, nor critics of such authoappearance of life, by shewing how great machina-rity as might restrain his extravagance: he therefore tions and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation. It is objected, that by this change of scenes the passions are interrupted in their progression, and that the principal event, being not advanced by a due gradation of preparatory incidents, wants at last the power to move, which constitutes the perfection of dramatic poetry. This reasoning is so specious, that it is received as true even by those who in daily experience feel it to be false. The interchanges of mingled scenes seldom fail to produce the intended vicissitudes of passion. Fiction cannot move so much, but that the attention may be easily transferred; and though it must be allowed that pleasing melancholy be sometimes interrupted by unwelcome levity, yet let it be considered likewise, that melancholy is often not pleasing, and that the disturbance of one man may be the relief of another; that different auditors have different habitudes; and that, upon the whole, all pleasure consists in variety.

The players, who in their edition divided our author's works into comedies, histories, and tragedies, seem not to have distinguished the three kinds, by any very exact or definite ideas.

An action which ended happily to the principal persons, however serious or distressful through its intermediate incidents, in their opinion constituted a comedy. This idea of a comedy continued long and plays were written, which, by changing the catastrophe, were tragedies to-day, and coLedies to-morrow.

amongst us,

Tragedy was not in those times a poem of more general dignity or elevation than comedy; it required only a calamitous conclusion, with which the common criticism of that age was satisfied, whatever lighter pleasure it afforded in its progress.

History was a series of actions, with no other than chronological succession, independent on each other, and without any tendency to introduce and regulate the conclusion. It is not always very nicely distinguished from tragedy. There is not much Barer approach to unity of action in the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, than in the history of Richard the Second. But a history might be continued through plays; as it had no plan, it had no limits. Through all these denominations of the drama, Shakspeare's mode of composition is the same; an interchange of seriousness and merriment, by which the mind is softened at one time, and exhilarated at sather. But whatever be his purpose, whether to padden or depress, or to conduct the story, without enence or emotion, through tracts of easy and aar dialogue, he never fails to attain his purpre; as he commands us, we laugh or mourn, or alent with quiet expectation, in tranquillity with

eut indifference.

When Shakspeare's plan is understood, most of the enticisms of Rymer and Voltaire vanish away. The play of Hamlet is opened, without impropriety, * two centinels; lago bellows at Brabantio's win

indulged his natural disposition, and his disposition, as Rymer has remarked, led him to comedy. In tragedy he often writes with great appearance of toil and study, what is written at last with little felicity; but in his comic scenes, he seems to produce without labour, what no labour can improve. In tragedy he is always struggling after some occasion to be comic, but in comedy he seems to repose, or to luxuriate, as in a mode of thinking congenial to his nature. In his tragic scenes there is always something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire. His comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.

The force of his comic scenes has suffered little diminution from the changes made by a century and a half, in manners or in words. As his personages act upon principles arising from genuine passion very little modified by particular forms, their plea

sures and vexations are communicable to all times and to all places; they are natural, and therefore durable; the adventitious peculiarities of personal habits, are only superficial dies, bright and pleasing for a little while, yet soon fading to a deep tinct, without any remains of former lustre; but the discriminations of true passion are the colours of nature; they pervade the whole mass, and can only perish with the body that exhibits them. The accidental compositions of heterogeneous modes are dissolved by the chance which combined them: but the uniform simplicity of primitive qualities neither admits increase, nor suffers decay. The sand heaped by one flood is scattered by another, but the rock always continues in its place. The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakspeare.

If there be, what I believe there is, in every nation, a style which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so consonant and congenial to the analogy and principles of its respective language, as to remain settled and unaltered: this style is probably to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be understood, without ambition of elegance. The polite are always catching modish innovations, and the learned depart from established forms of speech, in hope of finding or making better; those who wish for distinction forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar is right: but there is a conversation above grossness and below refinement, where propriety resides, and where this poet seems to have gathered his comic dialogue. He is therefore more agreeable to the ears of the present age than any other auther equally remote, and among his other excellencies deserves to be studied as one of the original masters of our language.

These observations are to be considered not as un

exceptionally constant, but as containing general and predominant truth. Shakspeare's familiar dialogue is affirmed to be smooth and clear, yet not wholly

without ruggedness or difficulty: as a country may | liness, formality, and reserve, yet perhaps the rebe eminently fruitful, though it has spots unfit for laxations of that severity were not very elegant. cultivation his characters are praised as natural, There must, however, have been always some modes though their sentiments are sometimes forced, and of gaiety preferable to others, and a writer ought to their actions improbable; as the earth upon the choose the best. whole is spherical, though its surface is varied with protuberances and cavities.

Shakspeare with his excellencies has likewise faults, and faults sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit. I shall shew them in the proportion in which they appear to me, without envious malignity or superstitious veneration. No question can be more innocently discussed than a dead poet's pretensions to renown; and little regard is due to that bigotry which sets candour higher than truth.

His first defect is that to which may be imputed most of the evil in books or in men. He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose. From his writings indeed a system of social duty may be selected, for he that thinks reasonably must think morally; but his precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to shew in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through right or wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and leaves their examples to operate by chance. This fault the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate; for it is always a writer's duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue independent on time or place.

In tragedy his performance seems constantly to be worse, as his labour is more. The effusions of passion, which exigence forces out, are for the most part striking and energetic; but whenever he solicits his invention, or strains his faculties, the offspring of his throes is tumour, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity.

In narration he affects a disproportionate pomp of diction, and a wearisome train of circumlocution, and tells the incident imperfectly in many words, which might have been more plainly delivered in few. Narration in dramatic poetry is naturally tedious, as it is unanimated and inactive, and obstructs the progress of the action; it should therefore always be rapid, and enlivened by frequent interruption. Shakspeare found it an incumbrance, and instead of lightening it by brevity, endeavoured to recommend it by dignity and splendour.

His declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak, for his power was the power of nature; when he endeavoured, like other tragic writers, to catch opportunities of amplification, and instead of inquiring what the occasion demanded, to shew how much his stores of knowledge could supply, he seldom escapes without the pity or resentment of his reader.

It is incident to him to be now and then entangled The plots are often so loosely formed, that a very with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well slight consideration may improve them, and so care-express, and will not reject; he struggles with it a lessly pursued, that he seems not always fully to comprehend his own design. He omits opportunities of instructing or delighting, which the train of his story seems to force upon him, and apparently rejects those exhibitions which would be more affecting, for the sake of those which are more easy.

It may be observed, that in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of his reward, he shortened the labour, to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented.

while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it.

Not that always where the language is intricate, the thought is subtle, or the image always great where the line is bulky; the equality of words to things is very often neglected, and trivial sentiments and vulgar ideas disappoint the attention, to which they are recommended by sonorous epithets and swelling figures.

But the admirers of this great poet have most reason to complain when he approaches nearest to his He had no regard to distinction of time or place, highest excellence, and seems fully resolved to sink but gives to one age or nation, without scruple, the them in dejection and mollify them with tender customs, institutions, and opinions of another, at the emotions by the fall of greatness, the danger of inexpence not only of likelihood, but of possibility. nocence, or the crosses of love. What he does best, These faults Pope has endeavoured, with more zeal he soon ceases to do. He is not long soft and pathan judgment, to transfer to his imagined interpo-thetic without some idle conceit, or contemptible lators. We need not to wonder to find Hector quot-equivocation. He no sooner begins to move, than ing Aristotle, when we see the loves of Theseus and he counteracts himself; and terror and pity, as they Hyppolyta combined with the Gothic mythology of are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by fairies. Shakspeare, indeed, was not the only vio-sudden frigidity. lator of chronology, for in the same age Sidney, who A quibble is to Shakspeare, what luminous vapours wanted not the advantages of learning, has in his Arcadia, confounded the pastoral with the feudal times, the days of innocence, quiet, and security, with those of turbulence, violence, and adventure.

are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. In his comic scenes, he is seldom very successful, Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquiwhen he engages his characters in reciprocations of sitions, whether he be enlarging knowledge, or exsmartness and contests of sarcasm; their jests are alting affection, whether he be amusing attention commonly gross, and their pleasantry licentious; with incidents, or enchanting it in suspense, let but neither his gentlemen nor his ladies have much deli- a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his cacy, nor are sufficiently distinguished from his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for clowns by any appearance of refined manners. which he will always turn aside from his career, or Whether he represented the real conversation of his stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren time is not easy to determine; the reign of Elizabeth as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content is commonly supposed to have been a time of state-to purchase it by the sacrifice of reason, propriety,

and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleo- | Shakspeare, that he assumes, as an unquestionable patra for which he lost the world, and was content principle, a position, which, while his breath is form to lose it. ing it into words, his understanding pronounces to be false. It is false, that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatic fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single monient, was ever credited.

It will be thought strange, that, in enumerating the defects of this writer, I have not yet mentioned his neglect of the unities; his violation of those laws which have been instituted and established by the joint authority of poets and of critics.

For his other deviations from the art of writing, I resign him to critical justice, without making any other demand in his favour, than that which must be indulged to all human excellence; that his virtues be rated with his failings: but, from the censure which this irregularity may bring upon him, I shall, with due reverence to that learning which I must oppose, adventure to try how I can defend him.

The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the play opens, the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Anthony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine more. He that can take the stage at one time for the palace of the Ptolemies, may take it in His histories, being neither tragedies nor comedies, half an hour for the promontory of Actium. Deluare not subject to any of their laws; nothing more sion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitais necessary to all the praise which they expect, than tion; if the spectator can be once persuaded, that that the changes of action be so prepared as to be his old acquaintance are Alexander and Cæsar, that understood, that the incidents be various and affect- a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharing, and the characters consistent, natural, and dis-salia, or the banks of Granicus, he is in a state of tinct. No other unity is intended, and therefore none elevation above the reach of reason, or of truth, and is to be sought. from the heights of empyrean poetry, may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is no reason why a mind thus wandering in ecstacy should count the clock, or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can

In his other works he has well enough preserved the unity of action. He has not, indeed, an intrigue perplexed and regularly unravelled; he does not endeavour to hide his design only to discover it, for this is seldom the order of real events, and Shak-make the stage a field. speare is the poet of nature: but his plan has commonly what Aristotle requires, a beginning, a middle, and an end; one event is concatenated with another, and the conclusion follows by easy consequence. There are perhaps some incidents that might be spared, as in other poets there is much talk that only Alls up time upon the stage; but the general system makes gradual advances, and the end of the play is the end of expectation.

To the unities of time and place he has shewn no regard and perhaps a nearer view of the principles on which they stand will diminish their value, and withdraw from them the veneration which, from the time of Corneille, they have very generally received, by discovering that they have given more trouble to the poet, than pleasure to the auditor.

The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players. They come to hear a certain number of lines recited with just gesture and elegant modulation. The lines relate to some action, and an action must be in some place; but the different actions that complete a story may be in places very remote from each other, and where is the absurdity of allowing that space to represent first Athens, and then Sicily, which was always known to be neither Sicily nor Athens, but a modern theatre ?

By supposition, as place is introduced, time may be extended; the time required by the fable elapses for the most part between the acts; for, of so much of the action as is represented, the real and poetical The necessity of observing the unities of time and duration is the same. If, in the first act, preparaplace arises from the supposed necessity of making tions for war against Mithridates are represented to the drama credible. The critics hold it impossible, be made in Rome, the event of the war may, without that an action of months or years can be possibly absurdity, be represented, in the catastrophe, as hapbelieved to pass in three hours; or that the specta-pening in Pontus; we know that there is neither war, for can suppose himself to sit in the theatre, while nor preparation for war; we know that we are neither ambassadors go and return between distant kings, in Rome nor Pontus: that neither Mithridates nor Luwhile armies are levied and towns besieged, while cullus are before us. The drama exhibits successive an exile wanders and returns, or till he whom they imitations of successive actions, and why may not a courting his mistress, shall lament the untimely the second imitation represent an action that hapfall of his son. The mind revolts from evident false-pened years after the first; if it be so connected with hood, and fiction loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of reality.

From the narrow limitation of time necessarily arises the contraction of place. The spectator, who Cows that he saw the first act at Alexandria, cansuppose that he sees the next at Rome, at a disace to which not the dragons of Medea could, in short a time, have transported him; he knows with inty that he has not changed his place; and he s that place cannot change itself; that what a house cannot become a plain; that what was The can never be Persepolis.

Such is the triumphant language with which a exults over the misery of an irregular poet, and exults commonly without resistance or reply. It is time therefore to tell him, by the authority of

it, that nothing but time can be supposed to intervene? Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination; a lapse of years is as easily conceived as a passage of hours. In contemplation we easily contract the time of real actions, and therefore willingly permit it to be contracted when we only see their imitation.

It will be asked, how the drama moves, if it is not credited. It is credited with all the credit due to a drama. It is credited, whenever it moves, as a just picture of a real original; as representing to the auditor what he would himself feel, if he were to do or suffer what is there feigned to be suffered or to be done. The reflection that strikes the heart is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed. If

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