'And one farther note of them let me leave you: tragedies and comedies were not writ then as they are now, promiscuously, by the same person; but he who found his genius bending to the one, never attempted the other way.

This is so plain, that I need not instance to you that Aristophanes, Plautus, Terence, never any of them writ a tragedy; Æschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca, never meddled with comedy: the sock and buskin were not worn by the same poet. Having then so much care to excel in one kind, very little is to be pardoned them if they miscarried in it; and this would lead me to the consideration of their wit, had not Crites given me sufficient warning not to be too bold in my judgment of it; because the languages being dead, and many of the customs and little accidents on which it depended lost to us, we are not competent judges of it. But though I grant that here and there we may miss the application of a proverb or a custom, yet a thing well said will be wit in all languages; and though it may lose something in the translation, yet to him who reads it in the original, 'tis still the same: he has an idea of its excellency, though it cannot pass from his mind into any other expression or words than those in which he finds it. When Phædria, in the Eunuch, had a command from his mistress to be absent two days, and, encouraging himself to go through with it, said, tandem ego non illa caream, si opus sit, vel totum triduum?—Parmeno, to mock the softness of his master, lifting up his hands and eyes, cries out, as it were in admiration, hui! universum triduum! the elegancy of which universum, though it cannot be rendered in our language, yet leaves an impression of the wit upon our souls: but this happens seldom in him; in Plautus oftener, who is infinitely too bold in his metaphors and coining words, out of which many times his wit is nothing; which questionless was one reason why Horace falls upon him so severely in those verses:

sed proavi nostri Plautinos et numeros et laudavere sales, nimium patienter utrumque, ne dicam stolidè

For Horace himself was cautious to obtrude a new word upon his readers and makes custom and common use of best measure of receiving it into our writings:

multa renascentur quae nunc cecidere, cadentque quae nunc sunt in honore vocabula, si valet usus, quem penes arbitrium est, et jus, et norma loquendi.

''The not observing this rule is that which the world has blamed in our satirist, Cleveland: to express a thing hard and unnaturally, in his new way of elocution. 'Tis true, no poet but

mixtaque ridenti colocasia fundet acantha,

in his eclogue of Pollio; and in his 7th Æneid,

mirantur et undae, miratur nemus insuetum fulgentia longe scuta virum fluvio pictasque innate carinas.

And Ovid once so modestly, that he asks leave to do it:

si verbo audac detur, haud metuam summi dixisse Palatia caeli,

calling the court of Jupiter by the name of Augustus his palace, though in another place he is more bold, where he says et longas visent Capitolia pompas. But to do this always, and never be able to write a line without it, though it may be admired by some few pedants, will not pass upon those who know that wit is best conveyed to us in the most easy language; and is most to be admired when a great thought comes dressed in words so commonly received that it is understood by the meanest apprehensions, as the best meat is the most easily digested: but we cannot read a verse of Cleveland's without making a face at it, as if every word were a pill to swallow: he gives us many times a hard nut to break our teeth, without a kernel for our pains. So that there is this difference betwixt his satires and Doctor Donne's, that the one gives us deep thoughts in common language, though rough cadence; the other gives us common thoughts in abstruse words. 'Tis true, in some places his wit is independent of his words, as in that of the Rebel Scat:

Had Cain been Scat, God would have chang'd his doom; Not forc'd him wander, but confin'd him home.

For beauty like white-powder makes no noise, And yet the silent hypocrite destroys.

You see, the last line is highly metaphorical, but it is so soft and gentle that it does not shock us as we read it.


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