een in anything
transacted before the audience. Orestes immediately after meets the
usurper at the entrance of his palace; and by a very happy thought of
the poet avoids killing him before the audience, by telling him that
he should live some time in his present bitterness of soul before he
would despatch him, and by ordering him to retire into that part
of the palace where he had slain his father, whose murder he would
revenge in the very same place where it was committed. By this means
the poet observes that decency, which Horace afterwards established as
a rule, of forbearing to commit parricides or unnatural murders before
the audience.

"Nec pueros coram populo Medea trucidet,"
ARS POET. ver. 185.

"Let not Medea draw her murd'ring knife,
And spill her children's blood upon the stage."
ROSCOMMON.

The French have therefore refined too much upon Horace's rule, who
never designed to banish all kinds of death from the stage; but only
such as had too much horror in them, and which would have a better
effect upon the audience when transacted behind the scenes. I would
therefore recommend to my countrymen the practice of the ancient
poets, who were very sparing of their public executions, and rather
chose to perform them behind the scenes, if it could be done with as
great an effect upon the audience. At the same time, I must observe,
that though the devoted persons of the tragedy were seldom slain
before the audience, which has generally something ridiculous in it,
their bodies were often produced after their death, which has always
in it something melancholy or terrifying; so that the killing on the
stage does not seem to have been avoided only as an indecency, but
also as an improbability.

"Nec pueros coram populo Medea trucidet:
Aut humana palam coquat exta nefarius Atreus;
Aut in avem Progne vertatur, Cadmus in anguem.
Quodcunque ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi."
HOR. ARS. POET. ver. 185.

"Medea must not draw her murd'ring knife,
Nor Atreus there his horrid feast prepare;
Cadmus and Progne's metamorphoses
(She to a swallow turn'd, he to a snake);
And whatsoever contradicts my sense,
I hate to see, and never can believe."
ROSCOMMON.

I have now gone through the several dramatic inventions which are made
use of by the ignorant poets to supply the place of tragedy, and
by the skilful to improve it; some of which I could wish entirely
rejected, and the rest to be used