Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 2.djvu/202

196 suffering of innocence and punishment of the offender is of the nature of English tragedy; contrarily, in the Greek, innocence is unhappy often, and the offender escapes. Then we are not touched with the sufferings of any sort of men so much as of lovers; and this was almost unknown to the ancients; so that they neither administered poetical justice, of which Mr. Rymer boasts, so well as we; neither knew they the best common place of pity, which is love.

He therefore unjustly blames us for not building on what the ancients left us; it seems, upon consideration of the premises, that we have wholly finished what they began.

My judgement on this piece is this: that it is extremely learned; but that the author of it is better read in the Greek than in the English poets; that all writers ought to study this critique, as the best account I have ever seen of the ancients; that the model of tragedy, he has here given, is excellent, and extremely correct; but that it is not the only model of all tragedy, because it is too much circumscribed in plot, Rh