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 anything 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 despatch 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 as a rule, of forbearing to commit parricides or unnatural murders before the audience.

  “Nec pueros coram populo Medea trucidet,”
  ARS POET. ver. 185.

  “Let not Medea draw her murd’ring knife,
  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.