Page:The works of Horace - Christopher Smart.djvu/305

 genus confused with the camel, or a white elephant attracted the eye of the crowd. He would view the people more attentively than the sports themselves, as affording him more strange sights than the actor: and for the writers, he would think they told their story to a deaf ass. For what voices are able to overbear the din with which our theaters resound? You would think the groves of Garganus, or the Tuscan Sea, was roaring; with so great noise are viewed the shows and contrivances, and foreign riches: with which the actor being daubed over, as soon as he appears upon the stage, each right hand encounters with the left. Has he said any thing yet? Nothing at all. What then pleases? The cloth imitating [the color of] violets, with the dye of Tarentum.

And, that you may not think I enviously praise those kinds of writing which I decline undertaking, when others handle them well: that poet to me seems able to walk upon an extended rope, who with his fictions grieves my soul, enrages, soothes, fills it with false terrors, as an enchanter; and sets me now in Thebes, now in Athens.

But of those too, who had rather trust themselves with a reader, than bear the disdain of an haughty spectator, use a