There is not a more absurd mistake than that whatever may not unnaturally happen in an action is of course to be admitted into every painting of it.  In Nature, the great and the little, the serious and the ludicrous, things the most disproportionate the one to the other, are frequently huddled together in much confusion, And what then?  It is the business of Art first to choose some determinate end and purpose, and then to select those parts of Nature, and those only, which conduce to that end, avoiding with most religious exactness the intermixture of anything which would contradict it.  Else the whole idea of propriety, that is, the only distinction between the just and chimerical in the arts, would be utterly lost.  An hero eats, drinks, and sleeps, like other men; but to introduce such scenes on the stage, because they are natural, would be ridiculous.  And why?  Because they have nothing to do with the end for which the play is written.  The design of a piece might be utterly destroyed by the most natural incidents in the world.  Boileau has somewhere criticized with what surely is a very just severity on Ariosto, for introducing a ludicrous tale from his host to one of the principal persons of his poem, though the story has great merit in its way.  Indeed, that famous piece is so monstrous and extravagant in all its parts that one is not particularly shocked with this indecorum.  But, as Boileau has observed, if Virgil had introduced AEneas listening to a bawdy story from his host, what an episode had this formed in that divine poem!  Suppose, instead of AEneas, he had represented the impious Mezentius as entertaining himself in that manner; such a thing would not have been without probability, but it would have clashed with the very first principles of taste, and, I would say, of common sense.

I have heard of a celebrated picture of the Last Supper,—­and if I do not mistake, it is said to be the work of some of the Flemish masters:  in this picture all the personages are drawn in a manner suitable to the solemnity of the occasion; but the painter has filled the void under the table with a dog gnawing bones.  Who does not see the possibility of such an incident, and, at the same time, the absurdity of introducing it on such an occasion!  Innumerable such cases might be stated.  It is not the incompatibility or agreeableness of incidents, characters, or sentiments with the probable in fact, but with propriety in design, that admits or excludes them from a place in any composition.  We may as well urge that stones, sand, clay, and metals lie in a certain manner in the earth, as a reason for building with these materials and in that manner, as for writing according to the accidental disposition of characters in Nature.  I have, I am afraid, been longer than it might seem necessary in refuting such a notion; but such authority can only be opposed by a good deal of reason.  We are not to forget that a play is, or ought to be, a very short composition;