“I hope I have already proved in this discourse, that though we are not altogether so punctual as the French, in observing the laws of Comedy:  yet our errors are so few, and [so] little; and those things wherein we excel them so considerable, that we ought, of right, to be preferred before them.

“But what will LISIDEIUS say? if they themselves acknowledge they are too strictly tied up by those laws:  for the breaking which, he has blamed the English?  I will allege CORNEILLE’s words, as I find them in the end of this Discourse of The three Unities. Il est facile aux speculatifs d’etre severe, &c. ’’Tis easy, for speculative people to judge severely:  but if they would produce to public view, ten or twelve pieces of this nature; they would, perhaps, give more latitude to the Rules, than I have done:  when, by experience, they had known how much we are bound up, and constrained by them, and how many beauties of the Stage they banished from it.’

“To illustrate, a little, what he has said.  By their servile imitations of the UNITIES of TIME and PLACE, and INTEGRITY OF SCENES they have brought upon themselves the Dearth of Plot and Narrowness of Imagination which may be observed in all their Plays.

“How many beautiful accidents might naturally happen in two or three days; which cannot arrive, with any probability, in the compass of twenty-four hours?  There is time to be allowed, also, for maturity of design:  which, amongst great and prudent persons, such as are often represented in Tragedy, cannot, with any likelihood of truth, be brought to pass at so short a warning.

“Farther, by tying themselves strictly to the UNITY OF PLACE and UNBROKEN SCENES; they are forced, many times, to omit some beauties which cannot be shown where the Act began:  but might, if the Scene were interrupted, and the Stage cleared, for the persons to enter in another place.  And therefore, the French Poets are often forced upon absurdities.  For if the Act begins in a Chamber, all the persons in the Play must have some business or other to come thither; or else they are not to be shown in that Act:  and sometimes their characters are very unfitting to appear there.  As, suppose it were the King’s Bedchamber; yet the meanest man in the Tragedy, must come and despatch his business there, rather than in the Lobby or Courtyard (which is [were] fitter for him), for fear the Stage should be cleared, and the Scenes broken.

“Many times, they fall, by it, into a greater inconvenience:  for they keep their Scenes Unbroken; and yet Change the Place.  As, in one of their newest Plays [i.e., before 1665].  Where the Act begins in a Street:  there, a gentleman is to meet his friend; he sees him, with his man, coming out from his father’s house; they talk together, and the first goes out.  The second, who is a lover, has made an appointment with his mistress:  she appears at the Window; and then, we are to imagine