to consider it) that the imaginary time of every play ought to be contrived into as narrow a compass, as the nature of the plot, the quality of the persons, and variety of accidents will allow.  In comedy, I would not exceed twenty-four or thirty hours; for the plot, accidents, and persons, of comedy are small, and may be naturally turned in a little compass:  But in tragedy, the design is weighty, and the persons great; therefore, there will naturally be required a greater space of time in which to move them.  And this, though Ben Jonson has not told us, yet it is manifestly his opinion:  For you see that to his comedies he allows generally but twenty-four hours; to his two tragedies, “Sejanus,” and “Catiline,” a much larger time, though he draws both of them into as narrow a compass as he can:  For he shews you only the latter end of Sejanus’s favour, and the conspiracy of Catiline already ripe, and just breaking out into action.

But as it is an error, on the one side, to make too great a disproportion betwixt the imaginary time of the play, and the real time of its representation; so, on the other side, it is an oversight to compress the accidents of a play into a narrower compass than that in which they could naturally be produced.  Of this last error the French are seldom guilty, because the thinness of their plots prevents them from it; but few Englishmen, except Ben Jonson, have ever made a plot, with variety of design in it, included in twenty-four hours, which was altogether natural.  For this reason, I prefer the “Silent Woman” before all other plays, I think justly, as I do its author, in judgment, above all other poets.  Yet, of the two, I think that error the most pardonable, which in too strait a compass crowds together many accidents, since it produces more variety, and, consequently, more pleasure to the audience; and, because the nearness of proportion betwixt the imaginary and real time, does speciously cover the compression of the accidents.

Thus I have endeavoured to answer the meaning of his argument; for, as he drew it, I humbly conceive that it was none,—­as will appear by his proposition, and the proof of it.  His proposition was this: 

“If strictly and duly weighed, it is as impossible for one stage to present two rooms, or houses, as two countries, or kingdoms,” &c.  And his proof this:  “For all being impossible, they are none of them nearest the truth or nature of what they present.”

Here you see, instead of proof or reason, there is only petitio principii.  For, in plain words, his sense is this:  Two things are as impossible as one another, because they are both equally impossible:  But he takes those two things to be granted as impossible, which he ought to have proved such, before he had proceeded to prove them equally impossible:  He should have made out first, that it was impossible for one stage to represent two houses, and then have gone forward to prove, that it was as equally impossible for a stage to present two houses, as two countries.