ecies, or producing
all the quotations, which would give the reader more trouble than
instruction. He that desires fuller instructions may read Vossius,
Valois, Saumaises, and Gataker, of whose compilations, however learned,
I should think it shame to be the author.

The mimi had their original from comedy, of which, at its first
appearance, they made a part; for their mimick actors always played and
exhibited grotesque dances in the comedies. The jealousy of rivalship
afterwards broke them off from the comick actors, and made them a
company by themselves. But to secure their reception, they borrowed from
comedy all its drollery, wildness, grossness, and licentiousness. This
amusement they added to their dances, and they produced what are now
called farces, or burlettas. These farces had not the regularity or
delicacy of comedies; they were only a succession of single scenes,
contrived to raise laughter, formed or unravelled without order, and
without connexion. They had no other end but to make the people laugh.
Now and then there might be good sentences, like the sentences of P.
Syrus, that are yet left us, but the groundwork was low comedy, and any
thing of greater dignity drops in by chance. We must, however, imagine,
that this odd species of the drama rose, at length, to somewhat a higher
character, since we are told that Plato, the philosopher, laid the mimi
of Sophron under his pillow, and they were found there after his death.
But in general we may say, with truth, that it always discovered the
meanness of its original, like a false pretension to nobility, in which
the cheat is always discovered, through the concealment of fictitious
splendour.

These mimi were of two sorts, of which the length was different, but the
purposes the same. The mimi of one species were short; those of the
other long, and not quite so grotesque. These two kinds were subdivided
into many species, distinguished by the dresses and characters, such as
show drunkards, physicians, men, and women.

Thus far of the Greeks. The Romans, having borrowed of them the more
noble shows of tragedy and comedy, were not content till they had their
rhapsodies. They had their _planipedes_, who played with flat soles,
that they might have the more agility; and their _sannions_, whose head
was shaved, that they might box the better. There is no need of naming
here all who had a name for these diversions among the Greeks and
Romans. I have said enough, a