“Though,” said EUGENIUS, “I am, at all times, ready to defend the honour of my country against the French; and to maintain, we are as well able to vanquish them with our pens, as our ancestors have been with their swords:  yet, if you please!” added he, looking upon NEANDER, “I will commit this cause to my friend’s management.  His opinion of our plays is the same with mine.  And besides, there is no reason that CRITES and I, who have now left the Stage, should re-enter so suddenly upon it:  which is against the laws of Comedy.”

“If the question had been stated,” replied LISIDEIUS, “Who had writ best, the French or English, forty years ago [i.e., in 1625]?  I should have been of your opinion; and adjudged the honour to our own nation:  but, since that time,” said he, turning towards NEANDER, “we have been so long bad Englishmen, that we had not leisure to be good Poets.  BEAUMONT [d. 1615], FLETCHER [d. 1625], and JOHNSON [d. 1637], who were only [alone] capable of bringing us to that degree of perfection which we have, were just then leaving the world; as if, in an Age of so much horror, Wit and those milder studies of humanity had no farther business among us.  But the Muses, who ever follow peace, went to plant in another country.  It was then, that the great Cardinal DE RICHELIEU began to take them into his protection; and that, by his encouragement, CORNEILLE and some other Frenchmen reformed their Theatre:  which, before, was so much below ours, as it now surpasses it, and the rest of Europe.  But because CRITES, in his discourse for the Ancients, has prevented [anticipated] me by touching on many Rules of the Stage, which the Moderns have borrowed from them; I shall only, in short, demand of you, ’Whether you are not convinced that, of all nations, the French have best observed them?’

“In the Unity of TIME, you find them so scrupulous, that it yet remains a dispute among their Poets, ’Whether the artificial day, of twelve hours more or less, be not meant by ARISTOTLE, rather that the natural one of twenty-four?’ and consequently, ’Whether all Plays ought not to be reduced into that compass?’ This I can testify, that in all their dramas writ within these last twenty years [1645-1665] and upwards, I have not observed any, that have extended the time to thirty hours.

“In the Unity of PLACE, they are full[y] as scrupulous.  For many of their critics limit it to that spot of ground, where the Play is supposed to begin.  None of them exceed the compass of the same town or city.

“The Unity of ACTION in all their plays, is yet more conspicuous.  For they do not burden them with Under Plots, as the English do; which is the reason why many Scenes of our Tragi-Comedies carry on a Design that is nothing of kin to the main Plot:  and that we see two distincts webs in a Play, like those in ill-wrought stuffs; and two Actions (that is, two Plays carried on together) to the confounding of the audience:  who, before they are warm in their concernments for one part, are diverted to another; and, by that means, expouse the interest of neither.