hind the scenes: the mother is heard calling out to her son for mercy; and the son answering her, that she showed no mercy to his father; after which she shrieks out that she is wounded, and by what follows we find that she is slain. I do not remember that in any of our plays there are speeches made behind the scenes, though there are other instances of this nature to be met with in those of the ancients: and I believe my reader will agree with me, that there is something infinitely more affecting in this dreadful dialogue between the mother and her son behind the scenes than could have been in any thing 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 dispatch 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 by a rule, of forbearing to commit parricides or unnatural murders before the audi

.ence.

"Nec pueros coram populo Medea trucidet."

"Let not Medea draw her murd'ring knife,

Ars Poet. ver. 185.

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 with caution. It would be an endless task to consider comedy in the same light, and to mention the innumerable shifts that small wits put in practice to raise a laugh. Bullock in a short coat, and Norris in a long one, seldom fail of this effect. In ordinary comedies, a broad and a narrow brimmed hat are different characters. Sometimes the wit of the scene lies in a shoulder-belt, and sometimes in a pair of whiskers. A lover running about the stage, with his head peeping out of a barrel*, was thought a very good jest in King Charles the Second's time; and invented by one of the first wits of that age. But because ridicule is not so delicate as compassion, and because the objects that make us laugh, are infinitely more numerous than those that make us weep, there is a much greater latitude for comic than tragic artifices, and by consequence a much greater indulgence to be allowed them.

The Comedy of The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub, by Sir George Etheridge.

MR. HOBBES*, in his Discourse of Human Nature, which, in my humble opinion, is much the best of all his works, after some very curious observations upon laughter, concludes thus: "The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly: for men laugh at the follies of themselves past, when they come suddenly to remembrance, except they bring with them any present dishonour."

According to this author, therefore, when we hear a man laugh excessively, instead of saying he is very merry, we ought to tell him he is very

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* Thomas Hobbes, of Malmsbury." He is commonly represented," says Granger, as a sceptic in religion, and a dogmatist in philosophy; but he was a dogmatist in both. The main principles of his Leviathan are as little founded in moral or evangelical truth, as the rules he has laid down for squaring the circle are in mathematical demonstration." He died in 1769, at the advanced age of 92.

proud. And indeed, if we look into the bottom of this matter, we shall meet with many observations to confirm us in this opinion. Every one laughs at somebody that is in an inferior state of folly to himself. It was formerly the custom for every great house in England to keep a tame fool dressed in petticoats, that the heir of the family might have an opportunity of joking upon him, and diverting himself with his absurdities. For the same reason, idiots are still in request in most of the courts of Germany, where there is not a prince of any great magnificence, who has not two or three dressed, distinguished, undisputed fools in his retinue, whom the rest of the courtiers are always breaking their jests upon.

The Dutch, who are more famous for their industry and application, than for wit and humour, hang up in several of their streets what they call the sign of the Gaper, that is, the head of an idiot dressed in a cap and bells, and gaping in a most immoderate manner. This is a standing jest at Amsterdam.

Thus every one diverts himself with some per son or other that is below him in point of understanding, and triumphs in the superiority of his genius, whilst he has such objects of derision be fore his eyes. Mr. Dennis has very well expressed this in a couple of humorous lines, which are part of a translation of a satire in Monsieur Boileau:

"Thus one fool lolls his tongue out at another,

And shakes his empty noddle at his brother."