than himself, the Greek tragedy, which he presumed to be so prodigiously
exalted beyond modern approaches, had gone farther even than the opera.
Addison himself, when writing a tragedy, made this violation (as he would
have said) of nature, made this concession (as _I_ should say) to a
higher nature, that he compelled his characters to talk in metre. It is
true this metre was the common iambic, which (as Aristotle remarks) is the
most natural and spontaneous of all metres; and, for a sufficient reason,
in all languages. Certainly; but Aristotle never meant to say that it was
natural for a gentleman in a passion to talk threescore and ten iambics
_consecutively_: a chance line might escape him once and away; as we
know that Tacitus opened one of his works by a regular dactylic hexameter
in full curl, without ever discovering it to his dying day (a fact which
is clear from his never having corrected it); and this being a very
artificial metre, _a fortiori_ Tacitus might have slipped into a simple
iambic. But that was an accident, whilst Addison had deliberately
and uniformly made his characters talk in verse. According to the common
and false meaning [which was his own meaning] of the word nature, he had
as undeniably violated the principle of the _natural_, by this metrical
dialogue, as the Italian opera by musical dialogue. If it is hard and
trying for men to sing their emotions, not less so it must be to deliver
them in verse.

But, if this were shocking, how much more shocking would it have seemed to
Addison, had he been introduced to parts which really exist in the Grecian
drama? Even Sophocles, who, of the three tragic poets surviving from the
wrecks of the Athenian stage, is reputed the supreme _artist_ [5] if
not the most impassioned poet, with what horror he would have overwhelmed
Addison, when read by the light of those principles which he had himself
so scornfully applied to the opera! In the very monsoon of his raving
misery, from calamities as sudden as they were irredeemable, a king is