And one farther note of them let me leave you: tragedies and comedies were not writ then as they are now, promiscuously, by the same person; but he who found his genius bending to the one, never attempted the other way. This is so plain, that I need not instance to you, that Aristophanes, Plautus, Terence, never any of them writ a tragedy; Æschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca, never meddled with comedy: the sock and buskin were not worn by the same poet. Having then so much care to excel in one kind, very little is to be pardoned them, if they miscarried in it; and this would lead me to the consideration of their wit, had not Crites given me sufficient warning not to be too bold in my judgment of it; because, the languages being dead, and many of the customs and little accidents on which it depended, lost to us, we are not competent judges of it. But though I grant, that here and there we may miss the application of a proverb or a custom, yet a thing well said will be wit in all languages; and though it may lose something in the translation, yet to him who reads it in the original, 'tis still the same; he has an idea of its excellency, though it cannot pass from his mind into any other expression or words than those in which he finds it. When Phædria in the "Eunuch" had a command from his mistress to be absent two days, and encouraging himself to go through with it, said, _Tandem ego non illâ caream, si sit opus, vel totum triduum?_ Parmeno, to mock the softness of his master, lifting up his hands and eyes, cries out, as it were in admiration, _Hui! universum triduum!_ the elegancy of which _universum_, though it cannot be rendered in our language, yet leaves an impression on our souls. But this happens seldom in him; in Plautus oftener, who is infinitely too bold in his metaphors and coining words, out of which many times his wit is nothing; which questionless was one reason why Horace falls upon him so severely in those verses: _Sed proavi nostri Plautinos et numeros, et Laudavere sales, nimium patienter utrumque, Ne dicam stolide_.[121] For Horace himself was cautious to obtrude a new word on his readers, and makes custom and common use the best measure of receiving it into writings: _Multa renascentur quæ nunc [jam] cecidere, cadentque Quæ nunc sunt in honore vocabula, si volet usus, Quem penes arbitrium est, et jus, et norma loquendi_. The not observing this rule is that which the world has blamed in our satyrist, Cleiveland; to express a thing hard and unnaturally, is his new way of elocution. It is true, no poet but may sometimes use a catachresis; Virgil does it,-- _Mistaque ridenti colocasia fundet acantho_,-- in his eclogue of Pollio; and in his seventh[122] Æneid, ----_mirantur et undæ, Miratur nemus, insuetum fulgentia longe Scuta virum fluvio, pictasque innare carinas_. And Ovid once so modestly, that he asks leave to do it: