Essays; On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition; On the Usefulness of Classical Learning (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: pofition, are not confined to the fame degree of probability; for that Farce may be allowed to be lefs probable than the regular Comedy; the Mafque, than the regular Tragedy; and the Mixed Epic, fuch as The Fairy Queen, and Orlando Furiofo, than the pure Epopee of Homer, Virgil, and Milton. But this part of the fubject feems not to require further illuftration. Enough has been faid, to fhow, that nothing unnatural can pleafe; and that therefore Poetry, whofe end is to pleafe, muft be According To Nature. And if fo, it muft be, either according to real nature, or according to nature fomewhat different from the reality. CHAP. III. Poetry exhibits a fyjtem of nature fomewhat different from the reality of things. TO exhibit real nature is the bufinefs of the hif- torian; who, if he were fidctly to confine himfelf to his own fphere, would never record even. the minuteft circumftance of any fpeech, event, or defcription, which was not warranted by fufficient authority. It has been the language of critics in every age, that the hiftorian ought to relate nothing as true which is falfe or dubious, and to conceal nothing material which he knows to be true. But I doubt whether any writer of profane hiftory has ever been fo fcrupulous. Thucydides himfelf, who began his hiftory when that war began which he records, and who fet down every event foon after it happened, according to the moft authentic information, feems however to have indulged his fancy not a little in his harangues and defcriptions, particularly that of the plague of Athens: And the fame thing has been practifed, with greater latitude, by Livy and Tacitus, and more or lefs by all the beft hiftorians, both ancient and modern. Nor do I blame them for it. By thefe improved or invented fpeeches, and by the hei...