to rescue his criticism from oblivion; though, at last, it will have
no other life than it derives from the work which it endeavours to
oppress. Why he pays no regard to the opinion of the audience, he
gives his reason by remarking that--

"A deference is to be paid to a general applause when it appears
that the applause is natural and spontaneous; but that little regard
is to be had to it when it is affected or artificial. Of all the
tragedies which in his memory have had vast and violent runs, not
one has been excellent, few have been tolerable, most have been
scandalous. When a poet writes a tragedy who knows he has judgment,
and who feels he has genius, that poet presumes upon his own merit,
and scorns to make a cabal. That people come coolly to the
representation of such a tragedy, without any violent expectation,
or delusive imagination, or invincible prepossession; that such an
audience is liable to receive the impressions which the poem shall
naturally make on them, and to judge by their own reason, and their
own judgments; and that reason and judgment are calm and serene, not
formed by nature to make proselytes, and to control and lord it over
the imagination of others. But that when an author writes a tragedy
who knows he has neither genius nor judgment, he has recourse to the
making a party, and he endeavours to make up in industry what is
wanting in talent, and to supply by poetical craft the absence of
poetical art: that such an author is humbly contented to raise
men's passions by a plot without doors, since he despairs of doing
it by that which he brings upon the stage. That party and passion,
and prepossession, are clamorous and tumultuous things, and so much
the more clamorous and tumultuous by how much the more erroneous:
that they domineer and tyrannise over the imaginations of persons
who want judgment, and sometimes too of those who have it, and, like