“Had CAIN been Scot, GOD would have changed his doom,
    Not forced him wander, but confined him home.

“Si sic, omnia dixisset! This is Wit in all languages.  ’Tis like MERCURY, never to be lost or killed.  And so that other,

    “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.

“But to return from whence I have digressed, to the consideration of the Ancients’ Writing and Wit; of which, by this time, you will grant us, in some measure, to be fit judges.

“Though I see many excellent thoughts in SENECA:  yet he, of them, who had a genius most proper for the Stage, was OVID.  He [i.e., OVID] had a way of writing so fit to stir up a pleasing admiration and concernment, which are the objects of a Tragedy; and to show the various movements of a soul combating betwixt different passions:  that, had he lived in our Age, or (in his own) could have writ with our advantages, no man but must have yielded to him; and therefore, I am confident the MEDEA is none of his.  For, though I esteem it, for the gravity and sentiousness of it (which he himself concludes to be suitable to a Tragedy, Omne genus scripti gravitate Tragadia, vincit); yet it moves not my soul enough, to judge that he, who, in the Epic way, wrote things so near the Drama (as the stories of MYRRHA, of CAUNUS and BIBLIS, and the rest) should stir up no more concernment, where he most endeavoured it.

“The masterpiece of SENECA, I hold to be that Scene in the Troades, where ULYSSES is seeking for ASTYANAX, to kill him.  There, you see the tenderness of a mother so represented in ANDROMACHE, that it raises compassion to a high degree in the reader; and bears the nearest resemblance, of anything in their Tragedies, to the excellent Scenes of Passion in SHAKESPEARE or in FLETCHER.

“For Love Scenes, you will find but few among them.  Their Tragic poets dealt not with that soft passion; but with Lust, Cruelty, Revenge, Ambition, and those bloody actions they produced, which were more capable of raising horror than compassion in an audience:  leaving Love untouched, whose gentleness would have tempered them; which is the most frequent of all the passions, and which (being the private concernment of every person) is soothed by viewing its own Image [p. 549] in a public entertainment.

“Among their Comedies, we find a Scene or two of tenderness:  and that, where you would least expect it, in PLAUTUS.  But to speak generally, their lovers say little, when they see each others but anima mea! vita mea! [Greek:  zoae kai psuchae!] as the women, in JUVENAL’s time, used to cry out, in the fury of their kindness.