poffeft of himself at that moment, as he deposes, and is ftrictly correct in his fact, the narrative is established.

I

N° LXXII.

SHALL now proceed to lay before the public, fuch an account as I have been enabled to collect of the several Greek writers of comedy.

The learned reader needs not to be informed, how little is to be found in Ariftotle's Poetics on the fubject of comedy; that treatise by no means answers to the general profeffion of its title; if it had come down to us as perfect and entire, as it probably was when the author put the laft hand to it, and prefented a correct copy of his work to Alexander, we might conclude otherwise of it; but to speak of it as it is, we can call it nothing more than a dissertation upon tragedy, in which many things are evidently out of place and order, fome no doubt loft, and others mutilated: It is thus confidered by the learned commentator Daniel Heinfius, who in his fupplementary treatise annexed to his edi

tion, profeffedly speaks only of the construction of tragedy, and endeavours with great diligence and perfpicuity to methodize the whole work, and difpofe his author's fyftem into fome order and regularity.

With the exception of a few obvious remarks upon the epic, as tending to illustrate the drama, and two or three paffages where comedy is fpoken of only as contrafted with tragedy, the whole of this celebrated differtation is nothing more than a fet of rules for the drama, which are mere transcripts from the compofitions of the great writers of the Homeric tragedy, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides: He analyzes and defines a poem, then actually carried to its perfection; but gives no new lights, no leading inftructions, for the furtherance and improvement of what had not arrived to the like ftate of maturity.

With the remains of the three tragic poets above mentioned in our hands, I profess I do not see how we are edified by Ariftotle's differtation, which offers nothing but what occurs upon the reading of their dramas; unless pofterity had feen fit to abide by the fame laws, which they observed, and the modern tragedy had been made exactly to conform to the Greek model.

Aristotle,

Ariftotle, as we have before remarked, speaks of no comedy antecedent to the comedy of Epicharmus : There is reafon to think that this author did not fall in with the perfonal comedy in the licentious manner it prevailed upon the Athenian ftage, even to the time of Ariftotle; for it was not reformed there, till the perfonal fatirifts were awed into better respect by the Macedonian princes, who fucceeded to Alexander; whereas Epicharmus wrote for the court of an abfolute prince.

Now it is remarkable, that Aristotle makes no ftrictures upon the licentiousness of the Athenian comedy, nor offers any rules for the correction of the ftage, though the schools profcribed it, and the tribunals were at open hoftility with it. It is plain he ftates things as they were, not as they ought to have been; for he pronounces of comedy that it is a picture of human nature, worfe and more deformed than the original.

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I cannot hold this to be a juft character of comedy, as it ftood at the time when Ariftotle pronounced it: The only entire comedies we have to refer to, are a contradiction to the affertion; for no one will contend that the corrupt and abominable manners of the times in which Aristophanes wrote, did not fully warrant H 4

the

the severity of his fatire, or that his characters of depravity are in general overcharged, and his pictures of human nature more deformed than their originals. As for the reft of the comic fraternity, their fragments only can plead for them; but they are fragments of fuch a nature, as prove them to have been moralifts of the fublimeft fort, and they have been collected, tranflated, and applauded, by the graveft and moft fententious of the Chriftian writers for many ages. I will venture to say, that in these fcattered reliques of the comic stage, more useful knowledge and good sense, better maxims for right conduct in life, and a more generous display of benevolence, juftice, public spirit, and all the moral virtues of natural religion are to be found, than in all the writings of the philofophers, which are fo much more entire.

Socrates, it is true, could hardly be prevailed upon to enter the comic theatre, but I infer very little against the poets on that account; Plate, I am aware, though an intimate of Ariftophanes, banished the drama out of his vifionary republic; but what is that more than to fay, that if all men were virtuous there would be no need of fatirifts? The comic poets in return lashed the philofophers over the fage, and they had what they merited, the

public applaufe on their fide; the schools and academies of fophifts furnished an inexhaustible fund for wholesome ridicule; their contradictory firft principles, their dæmons and clouds, and water and fire, with all their idle systems and hypotheses, their fabulous conceits, dreams and devices to catch the vulgar, and the affectea rigour of their manners, whilft in fecret they were addicted to the groffeft debauchery and impurity, were continual fubjects of fatire; and if hypocrify is not the comic poet's lawful game, what is? There is not a play of Ariftophanes to be named, in which these fanctified finners have not their fhare in the ridicule; and amongst the fragments above mentioned, a very large proportion falls to their lot.

Aristotle, who had very little feeling for Plato and his academy, or indeed for practical philosophy in general (which he seems to have profeffed only in oppofition to Xenocrates) concerned himself no further about the ftate of the stage, than to comment and remark upon the tragedies of the three chief writers above mentioned; and it is humiliating enough to the pride of criticism to obferve, that tragedy, after all his pains to hold it up to the standard of Sophocles and Euripides, funk with those authors, and was no more heard of; whilft co

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medy,