Page:An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.djvu/131

Rh they are abundantly interlaced with variety of fancies, tropes, and figures, which the criticks have enviously branded with the name of obscurity and false grammar.

Well, he is now fettered in business of more unpleasant nature: the Muses have lost him, but the commonwealth gains by it; the corruption of a poet is the generation of a statesman. He will not venture again into the civil wars of censure; ubi radios habitura triumphos n: if he had not told us he had left the Muses, we might have half suspected it by that word, ubi, which does not any way belong to them in that place; the rest of the verse is indeed Lucan's; but that ubi, I will answer for it, is his own. Yet he has another reason for this disgust of Poesie; for he says immediately after, that the manner of plays which are now in most esteem, is beyond his power to perform: to perform the manner of a thing, I confess is new English to me. However, he condemns not the satisfaction of others; but rather their unnecessary understanding, who, like Sancho Pança's doctor, prescribe too strictly to our appetites; for, says he, in the difference of Tragedy and Comedy, and of Farce itself, there can be no determination but by the taste, nor in the manner of their composure.

We shall see him now as great a critick as he was a poet; and the reason why he excelled so much in poetry will be evident, for it will appear to have proceeded from the exactness of his judgment. In the difference of Tragedy, Comedy, and Farce itself, there can be no determination but by the taste. I will not quarrel with the obscurity of his