themselves to be so, at the distresses they saw well painted and
represented. In short, they were of the opinion, with the wisest of men,
that it was better to go to the house of mourning, than to the house of
mirth; and had fortitude enough to trust themselves with their own
generous grief, because they found their hearts mended by it.

Thus also Horace, and the politest Romans in the Augustan age, wished to
be affected:

Ac ne forte putes me, quae facere ipse recusem,
Cum recte tractant alii, laudere maligne;
Ille per extentum funem mihi posse videtur
Ire poeta, meum qui pectus inaniter angit,
Irritat, mulcet; falsis terroribus implet,
Ut magus; & modo me Thebis, modo point Athenis.

Thus Englished by Mr. Pope:

Yet, lest thou think I rally more than teach,
Or praise malignly arts I cannot reach;
Let me, for once, presume t'instruct the times
To know the poet from the man of rhymes.
'Tis he who gives my breast a thousand pains:
Can make me feel each passion that he feigns;
Enrage--compose--with more than magic art,
With pity and with terror tear my heart;
And snatch me o'er the earth, or through the air,
To Thebes, to Athens, when he will, and where.

Our fair readers are also desired to attend to what a celebrated critic*
of a neighbouring nation says on the nature and design of tragedy, from
the rules laid down by the same great antient.

* Rapin, on Aristotle's Poetics.

'Tragedy,' says he, makes man modest, by representing the great masters
of the earth humbled; and it makes him tender and merciful, by showing
him the strange accidents of life, and the unforeseen disgraces, to which
the most important persons are subject.

'But because man is naturally timorous and compassionate, he may fall
into other extremes. Too much fear may shake his constancy of mind, and
too much of tragedy to regulate these two weaknesses. It prepares and
arms him against disgraces, by showing them so frequent in the most
considerable persons; and he will cease to fear extraordinary accidents,
when he sees them happen to the highest part of mankind. And still more
efficacious, we may add, the example will be, when he sees them happen
to the best.

'But as the end of tragedy is to teach men not to fear too weakly common
misfortunes, it proposes also to teach them to spare their compassion for
objects that deserve it. For