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 duration is
the same. If, in the first act, preparations for war against Mithridates
are represented to be made in Rome, the event of the war may, without
absurdity, be represented, in the catastrophe, as happening in Pontus; we
know that there is neither war, nor preparation for war; we know that we
are neither in Rome nor Pontus; that neither Mithridates nor Lucullus are
before us. The drama exhibits successive imitations of successive actions,
and why may not the second imitation represent an action that happened
years after the first; if it be so connected with 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 there be any fallacy,
it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy
for a moment; but we rather lament the possibility than suppose the
presence of misery, as a mother weeps over her babe, when she remembers
that death may take it from her. The delight of tragedy proceeds from our
consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they
would please no more.

Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for
realities, but because they bring realities to mind. When the imagination
is recreated by a painted landscape, the trees are not supposed capable to
give us shade, or the fountains coolness; but we consider how we should be
pleased with such fountains playing beside us, and such woods waving over
us. We are agitated in reading the history of _Henry the Fifth_, yet no
man takes his book for the field of Agincourt. A dram