Peindre Caton galant, et Brutus dameret.
Art Poetique, iii.--Ed.

[6] The critic must, when he wrote this, have forgotten the Cyclops of
Euripides, and also the fact, that when an Athenian dramatist
brought out his _three_ tragedies at the Dionysiac festival, he
added, as a fourth, a sort of farce; a specimen of which Schlegel
considers the Cyclops. Mr. Twining, in his amusing and instructive
notes on Aristotle's Poetics, refers to the drunken jollity of
Hercules in the Alcestis, and to the ludicrous dialogue between
Ulysses and Minerva, in the first scene of the Ajax of Sophocles, as
instances of Greek tragi-comedy. We may add the Electra of
Euripides; for if the poet did not intend to burlesque the rules of
tragic composition in many of the scenes of that play, and to make
his audience laugh, he calculated on more dull gravity in Athens,
than we are accustomed to give that city of song the credit for. The
broad ridicule which Aristophanes casts against the tragedians is
not half so laughable.

[7] Thus, says Dowries the Prompter, p. 22: "The tragedy of Romeo and
Juliet was made some time after [1662] into a tragi-comedy, by Mr.
James Howard, he preserving Romeo and Juliet alive; so that when the
tragedy was revived again, 'twas played alternately, tragical one
day, and tragi-comical another, for several days together."
STEEVENS.

[8] This opinion is controverted, and its effects deplored, by Dr. J.
Warton, in a note to Malone's Shakespeare, i. p. 71.--Ed.

[9] Dr. Drake conceives that Dr. Wolcot was indebted to the above noble
passage for the _prima stamina_ of the following stanza:

Thus, while I wond'ring pause o'er Shakespeare's page
I mark, in visions of delight, the sage
High o'er the wrecks of man who stands sublime,
A column in the melancholy waste,
(Its cities humbled, and its glories past,)
Majestic 'mid the solitude of time.--Ed.

[10] The poets and painters before and of Shakespeare's time were all
guilty of the same fault. The former "combined the Gothic mythology
of fairies" with the fables and traditions of Greek and Roman lore;
while the latter dressed out the heroes of antiquity in the arms
and costume of their own day. The grand front of Rouen cathedral
affords ample and curious illustration of what we state. Mr.
Steevens, in his Shakespeare, adds