lowed, continues thus:--If the passions be artfully
employed, the discourse becomes vehement and lofty: if otherwise,
there is nothing more ridiculous than a great passion out of season:
and to this purpose he animadverts severely upon AEschylus, who writ
nothing in cold blood, but was always in a rapture, and in fury with
his audience: the inspiration was still upon him, he was ever tearing
it upon the tripos; or (to run off as madly as he does, from one
similitude to another) he was always at high-flood of passion, even in
the dead ebb, and lowest water-mark of the scene. He who would raise
the passion of a judicious audience, says a learned critic, must be
sure to take his hearers along with him; if they be in a calm, 'tis in
vain for him to be in a huff: he must move them by degrees, and kindle
with them; otherwise he will be in danger of setting his own heap of
stubble on fire, and of burning out by himself, without warming the
company that stand about him. They who would justify the madness of
poetry from the authority of Aristotle, have mistaken the text, and
consequently the interpretation: I imagine it to be false read, where
he says of poetry, that it is [Greek: Euphuous e manikou], that it had
always somewhat in it either of a genius, or of a madman. 'Tis more
probable that the original ran thus, that poetry was [Greek: Euphuous
ou manikou], That it belongs to a witty man, but not to a madman. Thus
then the passions, as they are considered simply and in themselves,
suffer violence when they are perpetually maintained at the same
height; for what melody can be made on that instrument, all whose
strings are screwed up at first to their utmost stretch, and to the
same sound? But this is not the worst: for the characters likewise
bear a part in the general calamity, if you consider the passions as
embodied in them; for it follows of necessity, that no man can be
distinguished from another by his discourse, when every man is
ranting, swaggering, and exclaiming with the same excess: as if it
were the only business of all the characters to contend with each
other for the prize at Billingsgate; or that the scene of the tragedy
lay in Bethlem. Suppose the poet should intend this man to be
choleric, and that man to be patient; yet when they are confounded in
the writing, you cannot distinguish them from one another: for the man
who was called patient and tame, is only so before he speaks; but let
his clack be set a-goin