mercy. It would be the same in England, if we, for one moment,
thought that Shylock or Iago was standing before us. While the
dramatic art was in its infancy at Athens, it produced similar
effects on the ardent and imaginative spectators. It is said
that they blamed Aeschylus for frightening them into fits with
his Furies. Herodotus tells us that, when Phyrnichus produced
his tragedy on the fall of Miletus, they fined him in a penalty
of a thousand drachmas for torturing their feelings by so
pathetic an exhibition. They did not regard him as a great
artist, but merely as a man who had given them pain. When they
woke from the distressing illusion, they treated the author of it
as they would have treated a messenger who should have brought
them fatal and alarming tidings which turned out to be false. In
the same manner, a child screams with terror at the sight of a
person in an ugly mask. He has perhaps seen the mask put on.
But his imagination is too strong for his reason; and he entreats
that it may be taken off.

We should act in the same manner if the grief and horror produced
in us by works of the imagination amounted to real torture. But
in us these emotions are comparatively languid. They rarely
affect our appetite or our sleep. They leave us sufficiently at
ease to trace them to their causes, and to estimate the powers
which produce them. Our attention is speedily diverted from the
images which call forth our tears to the art by which those
images have been selected and combined. We applaud the genius of
the writer. We applaud our own sagacity and sensibility; and we
are comforted.

Yet, though we think that in the progress of nations towards