Page:An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.djvu/82

62 and from thence again to Rome; and besides, has allowed a very inconsiderable time, after Catiline's speech, for the striking of the battle, and the return of Petreius, who is to relate the event of it to the senate: which I should not animadvert on him, who was otherwise a painful observer of, or the decorum of the stage, if he had not used extreme severity in his judgment on the incomparable Shakspeare for the same fault n.—To conclude on this subject of relations; if we are to be blamed for shewing too much of the action, the French are as faulty for discovering too little of it: a mean betwixt both should be observed by every judicious writer, so as the audience may neither be left unsatisfied by not seeing what is beautiful, or shocked by beholding what is either incredible or undecent.

'I hope I have already proved in this discourse, that though we are not altogether so punctual as the French, in observing the laws of comedy, yet our errours are so few, and little, and those things wherein we excel them so considerable, that we ought of right to be preferred before them. But what will Lisideius say, if they themselves acknowledge they are too strictly bounded by those laws, for breaking which he has blamed the English? I will alledge Corneille's words, as I find them in the end of his Discourse of the three Unities:—Il est facile aux speculatifs d'estre severes &c. Tis easy for speculative persons to judge severely; but if they would produce to publick view ten or twelve pieces of this nature, they would perhaps give more