Here is Lord Holland's metrical version of the concluding lines of this passage: Once to behold a monarch on the stage, England, 'tis said, our prudent Philip's rage; Or that he deem'd such characters unfit For lively sallies and for comic wit; Or crowns debas'd, if actors were allow'd To bring the state of kings before a low-born crowd. In his 'Hamburg Dramaturgy,' (p. 394-5 of the English version in Bohn's series) Lessing translates a score of these lines, ending with Lope's assertion that nature has set us the example of commingling the ludicrous with the serious; and then he asks: "Is it true that nature sets us an example of the common and the sublime, the farcical and the serious, the merry and the sad? It seems so. But if this is true, Lope has done more than he intended; he has not only glossed over the faults of his stage, he has really proved that these are no faults, for nothing can be a fault that is an imitation of nature." But Mezières in the introduction he prefixt to the French translation of Lessing's dramatic criticism quotes a passage from Diderot on the danger of uniting tragedy and burlesque: "Tragicomedy is never be more than a bad species, because in it are confounded two disparate species, separated by a natural barrier." Here Lessing, who had derived so much from Diderot, reveals himself as in advance and on firmer ground than his French contemporary. It is amusing to note that Diderot, so often hailed as a forerunner of the Romanticists, is here a belated echo of so strict a classicist as Sir Philip Sidney who asserted that the plays he saw on the English stage were "neither right tragedies, nor right comedies, mingling Kings and Clowns, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in Clowns by head and shoulders, to play a part in magestical matters, with neither decency nor discretion: So as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportfulness is by their mongrel Tragicomedy attained." 16. Morel-Fatio notes that this passage also is derived directly from Robortello. 17. These lines Lord Holland turns into English couplets: The tragic with the comic muse combin'd, Grave Seneca with sprightly Terence join'd, May seem, I grant, Pasiphaë's monstrous birth, Where one half moves our sorrow, one our mirth. But sweet variety must still delight, And, spite of rules, dame Nature says we're right, Thru' all her works she this example gives, And from variety her charms derives. With this statement of Lope's may be compared the theory set forth by Victor Hugo in the preface to 'Cromwell.' 19. Here once more, as Morel-Fatio has shown, Lope is leaning upon Robortello. Three and a half lines of this passage Lord Holland translates freely in this triplet: Who seated once, disdain to go away, Unless in two short hours they see the play Brought down from Genesis to judgment day.