"For Love Scenes, you will find but few among them. Their Tragic poets dealt not with that soft passion; but with Lust, Cruelty, Revenge, Ambition, and those bloody actions they produced, which were more capable of raising horror than compassion in an audience: leaving Love untouched, whose gentleness would have tempered them; which is the most frequent of all the passions, and which (being the private concernment of every person) is soothed by viewing its own Image [p. 549] in a public entertainment. "Among their Comedies, we find a Scene or two of tenderness: and that, where you would least expect it, in PLAUTUS. But to speak generally, their lovers say little, when they see each others but anima mea! vita mea! [Greek: zoae kai psuchae!] as the women, in JUVENAL's time, used to cry out, in the fury of their kindness. "Then indeed, to speak sense were an offence. Any sudden gust of passion, as an ecstasy of love in an unexpected meeting, cannot better be expressed than in a word and a sigh, breaking one another. Nature is dumb on such occasions; and to make her speak, would be to represent her unlike herself. But there are a thousand other concernments of lovers as jealousies, complaints, contrivances, and the like; where, not to open their minds at large to each other, were to be wanting to their own love, and to the expectation of the audience: who watch the Movements of their Minds, as much as the Changes of their Fortunes. For the Imaging of the first [p. 549], is properly the work of a Poet; the latter, he borrows of the Historian." EUGENIUS was proceeding in that part of his discourse, when CRITES interrupted him. "I see," said he, "EUGENIUS and I are never likely to have this question decided betwixt us: for he maintains the Moderns have acquired a _new perfection_ in writing; I only grant, they have _altered the mode_ of it. "HOMER describes his heroes, [as] men of great appetites; lovers of beef broiled upon the coals, and good fellows: contrary to the practice of the French romances, whose heroes neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep for love. "VIRGIL makes _AENEAS_, a bold avower of his own virtues, "_Sum pius AENEAS fama super aethera notus_; "which, in the civility of our Poets, is the character of a _Fanfaron_ or Hector. For with us, the Knight takes occasion to walk out, or sleep, to avoid the vanity of telling his own story; which the trusty Squire is ever to perform for him [p. 535]. "So, in their Love Scenes, of which EUGENIUS spoke last, the Ancients were more hearty; we, the more talkative. They writ love, as it was then the mode to make it. "And I will grant thus much to EUGENIUS, that, perhaps, one of their Poets, had he lived in our Age, "_Si foret hoc nostrum fato delupsus in aevum_,