gall, or in poison dangerous as that of the aspic or viper; but whose bursts of malice, and sallies of wit, often give a blow where it is not expected. The Muse of Terence, and consequently of Menander, is an artless and unpainted beauty, of easy gaiety, whose features are rather delicate than striking, rather soft than strong, rather plain and modest than great and haughty, but always perfectly natural. Ce n'est pas un portrait, une image semblable; The Muse of Moliere is not always plainly dressed, but takes airs of quality, and rises above her original condition, so as to attire herself gracefully in magnificent apparel. In her manners she mingles elegance with foolery, force with delicacy, and grandeur, or even haughtiness, with plainness and modesty. If sometimes, to please the people, she gives a loose to farce, it is only the gay folly of a moment, from which she immediately returns, and which lasts no longer than a slight intoxication. The first might be painted encircled with little satyrs, some grossly foolish, the others delicate, but all extremely licentious and malignant; monkeys always ready to laugh in your face, and to point out to indiscriminate ridicule, the good and the bad. The second may be shown encircled with geniuses full of softness and of candour, taught to please by nature alone, and whose honeyed dialect is so much the more insinuating, as there is no temptation to distrust it. The last must be accompanied with the delicate laughter of the court, and "that of the city somewhat more coarse, and neither the one nor the other can be separated from her. The Muse of Aristophanes and of Plautus can never be denied the honour of sprightliness, animation and invention; nor that of Menander and Terence the praise of nature and of delicacy; to that of Moliere must be allowed the happy secret of uniting all the piquancy of the former, with a peculiar art which they did not know. Of these three sorts of merit, let us show to each the justice that is due, let us in each separate the pure and the true from the false gold, without approving or condemning either the one or the other in the gross. If we must pronounce in generál upon the taste of their writings, we must indisputably allow that Menander, Terence, and Moliere, will give most pleasure to a decent audience, and consequently that they approach nearer to the true beauty, and have less mixture of beauties purely relative, than Plautus and Aristophanes. If we distinguish comedy by its subjects, we shall find three sorts among the Greeks, and as many among the Latins, all differently dressed; if we distinguish it by ages and authors, we shall again find three sorts; and we shall find three sorts a third time if we regard more closely the subject. As the ultimate and general rules of all these sorts of comedy are the same, it will, perhaps, be agreeable to our purpose to sketch them out before we give a full display of the last class. I can do nothing better on this occasion than transcribe the twenty fifth reflection of Rapin upon poetry in particular. XIII. "Comedy," says he,*" is a represen- General rules tation of common life; its end is to show the of comedy. faults of particular characters on the stage, to correct the disorder of the people by the fear of ridicule. Thus ridicule is the essential part of a comedy. Ridicule may be in words, or in things; it may be decent, or grotesque. To find what is ridiculous in every thing, is the gift merely of nature; for all the actions of life have their bright and their dark sides; something serious, and something merry. But Aristotle, who has given rules for drawing tears, has given none for raising laughter; for this is merely the work of nature, and must proceed from genius, with very little help from art or matter. The Spaniards have a turn to find the ridicule in things much more than we; and the Italians, who are natural comedians, have a better turn for expressing it; their language is more proper for it than ours, by an air of drollery which it can put on, and of which ours may become capable when it shall be brought nearer to perfection. In short, that agreeable turn, that gaiety which yet maintains the delicacy of its character without falling into dulness or into buffoonery, that elegant raillery which is the flower of fine wit, is the qualification which comedy requires. We must, however, remember, that the true artificial ridicule, which is required on the theatre, must be only a transcript of the ridicule which nature affords. Comedy is naturally written, when being on the theatre, a man can fancy himself in a private family, or a particular part of the town, and meets with nothing but what he really meets with in the world; * Reflections sur la Poët. p. 154. Paris, 1684. for it is no real comedy in which a man does not see his own picture, and find his own manners and those of the people among whom he lives. Menander succeeded only by this art among the Greeks; and the Romans, when they sat at Terence's comedies, imagined themselves in a private party; for they found nothing there which they had not been used to find in common company. The great art of comedy is to adhere to nature without deviation; to have general sentiments and expressions which all the world can understand; for the writer must keep it always in his mind, that the coarsest touches after nature will please more than the most delicate with which nature is inconsistent. However, low and mean words sho I never be allowed upon the stage, if they are not supped with some kind of wit. Proverbs and vulgar smartnesses can never be suffered, unless they have something in them of nature and pleasantry. This is the universal principle of comedy; whatever is represented in this manner must please, and nothing can ever please without it. It is by application to the study of nature alone that we arrive at probability, which is the only infallible guide to theatrical success. Without this probability every thing is defective, and that which has it, is beautiful; he that follows this, can never go wrong; and the most common faults of comedy proceed from the neglect of propriety, and the precipitation. of incidents. Care must likewise be taken that the hints, made use of to introduce the incidents, are not too strong, that the spectator may enjoy the pleasure of finding out their meaning; but commonly the weak place in our comedy is the untying of the plot, in which we almost always fail, on account of the difficulty which there is in disentangling of what has been perplexed. To perplex an intrigue is easy, the imagination does it by itself; but it must be disentangled merely by the judgment, and is, therefore, seldom done happily; and he that reflects a very little, will find that most comedies are faulty by an unnatural catastrophe. It remains to be examined whether comedy will allow pictures larger than the life, that this strength of the strokes may make a deeper impression upon the mind of the spectators; that is, if a poet may make a covetous man more covetous, and a peevish man more impertinent and more troublesome than he really is. To which I answer, that this was the practice of Plautus, whose aim was to please the people; but that Terence, who wrote for gentlemen, confined himself within the compass of nature, and represented vice without addition or aggravation. However, these extravagant characters, such as the Citizen turned Gentleman, and the Hypochondriac Patient of Moliere, have lately succeeded at court, where delicacy is carried so far; but every thing, even to provincial interludes, is well received if it has but merriment, for we These are the most im had rather laugh than admire. portant rules of comedy." Three sorts of comedy. XIV. These rules, indeed, are common to the three kinds which I have in my mind; but it is necessary to distinguish each from the rest, which may be done by diversity of matter, which always makes some diversity of management. The old and middle comedy simply represented real adventures; in the same way some passages of history and of fable might |