It is objected, that by this change of scenes the passions are
interrupted in their progression, and that the principal event,
being not advanced by a due gradation of preparatory incidents,
wants at last the power to move, which constitutes the perfection
of dramatick poetry. This reasoning is so specious, that it is
received as true even by those who in daily experience feel it to
be false. The interchanges of mingled scenes seldom fail to produce
the intended vicissitudes of passion. Fiction cannot move so much,
but that the attention may be easily transferred; and though it
must be allowed that pleasing melancholy be sometimes interrupted
by unwelcome levity, yet let it be considered likewise, that
melancholy is often not pleasing, and that the disturbance of one
man may be the relief of another; that different auditors have
different habitudes; and that, upon the whole, all pleasure consists
in variety.

The players, who in their edition divided our authour's works into
comedies, histories, and tragedies, seem not to have distinguished
the three kinds, by any very exact or definite ideas.

An action which ended happily to the principal persons, however
serious or distressful through its intermediate incidents, in
their opinion constituted a comedy. This idea of a comedy continued
long amongst us, and plays were written, which, by changing the
catastrophe, were tragedies to-day and comedies to-morrow.

Tragedy was not in those times a poem of more general dignity or
elevation than comedy; it required only a calamitous conclusion,
with which the common criticism of that age was satisfied, whatever