of criticism will be readily
allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The
end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by
pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy
or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alternations
of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of
life, by shewing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or
obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general
system by unavoidable concatenation.

It is objected that by this change of scenes the passions are interrupted
in their progression, and that the principal event, being not advanced by
a due gradation of preparatory incidents, wants at last the power to move,
which constitutes the perfection of dramatick poetry. This reasoning is so
specious, that it is received as true even by those who in daily
experience feel it to be false. The interchanges of mingled scenes seldom
fail to produce the intended vicissitudes of passion. Fiction cannot move
so much, but that the attention may be easily transferred; and though it
must be allowed that pleasing melancholy be sometimes interrupted by
unwelcome levity, yet let it be considered likewise, that melancholy is
often not pleasing, and that the disturbance of one man may be the relief
of another; that different auditors have different habitudes; and that,
upon the whole, all pleasure consists in variety.

The players, who in their edition divided our author's works into
comedies, histories, and tragedies, seem not to have distinguished the
three kinds, by any very exact or definite ideas.

An action which ended happily to the principal persons, however serious or
distressful through its intermediate incidents, in their opinion
constituted a comedy. This idea of a comedy continued long amongst us, and
plays were written, which, by changing the catastrophe, were tragedies
to-day, and comedies to-morrow.

Tragedy was not in those times a poem of more general dignity or elevation
than comedy; it required only a calamitous conclusion, with which the
common criticism of that age was satisfied, whatever lighter pleasure it
afforded in its progress.

History was a series of actions, with no other than chronological
succession, independent on each other, and without any tendency to
introduce and regulate the conclusion. It is not always very nicely
distinguis