that consideration moves pity in us, and insensibly works us to be helpful to, and tender over, the distressed; which is the noblest and most godlike of moral virtues, Here it is observable, that it is absolutely necessary to make a man virtuous, if we desire he should be pitied:  we lament not, but detest, a wicked man; we are glad when we behold his crimes are punished, and that poetical justice is done upon him.  Euripides was censured by the critics of his time, for making his chief characters too wicked; for example, Phaedra, though she loved her son-in-law with reluctancy, and that it was a curse upon her family for offending Venus, yet was thought too ill a pattern for the stage.  Shall we therefore banish all characters of villainy?  I confess I am not of that opinion; but it is necessary that the hero of the play be not a villain; that is, the characters, which should move our pity, ought to have virtuous inclinations, and degrees of moral goodness in them.  As for a perfect character of virtue, it never was in nature, and therefore there can be no imitation of it; but there are allays of frailty to be allowed for the chief persons, yet so that the good which is in them shall outweigh the bad, and consequently leave room for punishment on the one side, and pity on the other.

After all, if any one will ask me, whether a tragedy cannot be made upon any other grounds than those of exciting pity and terror in us;—­Bossu, the best of modern critics, answers thus in general:  That all excellent arts, and particularly that of poetry, have been invented and brought to perfection by men of a transcendent genius; and that, therefore, they, who practise afterwards the same arts, are obliged to tread in their footsteps, and to search in their writings the foundation of them; for it is not just that new rules should destroy the authority of the old.  But Rapin writes more particularly thus, that no passions in a story are so proper to move our concernment, as fear and pity; and that it is from our concernment we receive our pleasure, is undoubted.  When the soul becomes agitated with fear for one character, or hope for another; then it is that we are pleased in tragedy, by the interest which we take in their adventures.

Here, therefore, the general answer may be given to the first question, how far we ought to imitate Shakespeare and Fletcher in their plots; namely, that we ought to follow them so far only, as they have copied the excellencies of those who invented and brought to perfection dramatic poetry; those things only excepted, which religion, custom of countries, idioms of languages, &c. have altered in the superstructures, but not in the foundation of the design.