“To go no further than TERENCE.  You find in the Eunuch, ANTIPHO entering, single, in the midst of the Third Act, after CHREMES and PYTHIAS were gone off.  In the same play, you have likewise DORIAS beginning the Fourth Act alone; and after she has made a relation of what was done at the soldier’s entertainment (which, by the way, was very inartificial to do; because she was presumed to speak directly to the Audience, and to acquaint them with what was necessary to be known:  but yet should have been so contrived by the Poet as to have been told by persons of the Drama to one another, and so by them, to have come to the knowledge of the people), she quits the Stage:  and PHAEDRIA enters next, alone likewise.  He also gives you an account of himself, and of his returning from the country, in monologue:  to which unnatural way of Narration, TERENCE is subject in all his Plays.

“In his Adelphi or ‘Brothers,’ SYRUS and DEMEA enter after the Scene was broken by the departure of SOSTRATA, GETA, and CANTHARA; and, indeed, you can scarce look into any of his Comedies, where you will not presently discover the same interruption.

“And as they have failed both in [the] laying of the Plots, and managing of them, swerving from the Rules of their own Art, by misrepresenting Nature to us, in which they have ill satisfied one intention of a Play, which was Delight:  so in the Instructive part [pp. 513, 582-4], they have erred worse.  Instead of punishing vice, and rewarding virtue; they have often shown a prosperous wickedness, and an unhappy piety.  They have set before us a bloody Image of Revenge, in MEDEA; and given her dragons to convey her safe from punishment.  A PRIAM and ASTYANAX murdered, and CASSANDRA ravished; and Lust and Murder ending in the victory of him that acted them.  In short, there is no indecorum in any of our modern Plays; which, if I would excuse, I could not shadow with some Authority from the Ancients.

“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; AESCHYLUS, 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 judgement of it; because (the languages being dead, and many of the customs and little accidents on which it depended lost to us [p. 518]) 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.