sued and run down by much greater beasts than themselves; and the true British foxhunter is most undoubtedly a species appropriated and peculiar to this country, which no other part of the globe produces. [June 30,

1751.]

POLITE AFFECTION.

Remember to bring

your mother some little presents; they need not be of value, but only marks of your affection and duty for one who has always been tenderly fond of you. You may bring Lady Chesterfield a little Martin snuff-box, of about five louis; and you need bring over no other presents; you and I not wanting les petits présens pour entretenir l'amitié. [July 8, 1751.]

INATTENTION.-Laziness of mind, or inattention, are as great enemies to knowledge, as incapacity; for, in truth, what difference is there between a man who will not, and a man who cannot, be informed? This difference only, that the former is justly to be blamed, and the latter to be pitied. And yet how many are there, very capable of reciving knowledge, who from laziness, inattention, and incuriousness, will not so much as ask for it, much less take the least pains to acquire it.

Our young English travellers generally dis

tinguish themselves by a voluntary privation of all that useful knowledge for which they are sent abroad; and yet, at that age, the most useful knowledge is the most easy to be acquired; conversation being the book, and the best book, in which it is contained. [Jan. 2, 1752.]

THE DRAMA.-I could wish there were a treaty made between the French and the English theatres, in which both parties should make considerable concessions. The English ought to give up their notorious violations of all the unities; and all their massacres, racks, dead bodies, and mangled carcasses, which they so frequently exhibit upon their stage. The French should engage to have more action, and less declamation; and not to cram and crowd things together to almost a degree of impossibility, from a too scrupulous adherence to the unities. The English should restrain the licentiousness of their poets, and the French enlarge the liberty of theirs : their poets are the greatest slaves in their country, and that is a bold word; ours are the most tumultuous subjects in England, and that is saying a good deal. Under such regulations, one might hope to see a play, in which one should not be lulled to sleep by the length of a monotonical declamation, nor frightened and shocked by the barbarity of the

action. The unity of time extended occasionally to three or four days, and the unity of place broke into, as far as the same street, or sometimes the same town; both which, I will affirm, are as probable, as four-and-twenty hours, and the same room.

More indulgence too, in my mind, should be shown, than the French are willing to allow, to bright thoughts, and to shining images; for though I confess, it is not very natural for a hero or a princess to say fine things, in all the violence of grief, love, rage, etc., yet I can as well suppose that, as I can that they should talk to themselves for half an hour; which they must necessarily do, or no tragedy could be carried on, unless they had recourse to a much greater absurdity, the choruses of the ancients. Tragedy is of a nature, that one must see it with a degree of self-deception; we must lend ourselves, a little, to the delusion; and I am very willing to carry that complaisance a little further than the French do.

Tragedy must be something bigger than life, or it would not affect us. In nature the most

violent passions are silent; in tragedy they must speak, and speak with dignity too. Hence the necessity of their being written in verse, and, unfortunately for the French, from the weakness of their language, in rhymes. And

for the same reason, Cato, the Stoic, expiring at Utica, rhymes masculine and feminine,* at Paris; and fetches his last breath at London, in most harmonious and correct blank verse.

For

It is quite otherwise with comedy, which should be mere common life, and not one jot bigger. Every character should speak upon the stage, not only what it would utter in the situation there represented, but in the same manner in which it would express it. which reason, I cannot allow rhymes in comedy, unless they were put into the mouth and came out of the mouth of a mad poet. But it is impossible to deceive one's self enough (nor is it the least necessary in comedy) to suppose a dull rogue of a usurer cheating, or gros Jean blundering, in the finest rhymes in the world.

As for operas, they are essentially too absurd and extravagant to mention : I look upon them as a magic scene, contrived to please the eyes and the ears, at the expense of the understanding; and I consider singing, rhyming, and chiming heroes, and princesses and philosophers, as I do the hills, the trees, the birds, and the beasts, who amicably joined in one common country dance, to the irresistible tune of Orpheus's lyre. Whenever I go to an opera, I

*As to terminations, so careful were the best French poets of their rhymes,

leave my sense and reason at the door with my half guinea, and deliver myself up to my eyes and my ears. [Jan. 23, 1752.]

RIDICULE.-It is commonly said, and more particularly by Lord Shaftesbury, that ridicule is the best test of truth; for that it will not stick where it is not just. I deny it.* A truth learned in a certain light, and attacked in certain words by men of wit and humor, may, and often doth, become ridiculous, at least so far, that the truth is only remembered and repeated for the sake of the ridicule. The overturn of Mary of Medicis into a river, where she was half drowned, would never have been remembered, if Madame de Vernueil, who saw it, had not said la Reine boit. Pleasure or malignity often gives ridicule a weight, which it does not deserve. [Same date.]

*Chesterfield had at once perceived the emptiness of the saying, which is certainly not in ipsissimis verbis of Lord Shaftesbury. "We have," says Carlyle, in his "Essay on Voltaire," "oftener than once endeavored to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury-which, however, we can find nowhere in his works,-that ridicule is the test of truth." In the Characteristics of Enthusiasm," sec. 2, there is this sentence, which comes very near it :-"How is it, etc., that we (Christians) appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule"; but further on (p. 11, ed. 1733, vol. i.) he asks: "For what ridicule can lie against reason? or how can any one of the least justice of thought admire a ridicule wrong placed? Nothing is more ridiculous than this itself." Shaftesbury often returns to this subject; see "Errors in Wit," etc.