have found some sorry excuse at least, for detaining the reader from the promised siege. On these terms, this Capaneus of a poet engaged his two immortal predecessors; and his success was answerable to his enterprise.[30] If this œconomy must be observed in the minutest parts of an epic poem, which, to a common reader, seem to be detached from the body, and almost independent of it; what soul, though sent into the world with great advantages of nature, cultivated with the liberal arts and sciences, conversant with histories of the dead, and enriched with observations on the living, can be sufficient to inform the whole body of so great a work? I touch here but transiently, without any strict method, on some few of those many rules of imitating nature, which Aristotle drew from Homer's Iliads and Odysseys, and which he fitted to the drama; furnishing himself also with observations from the practice of the theatre, when it flourished under Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles: for the original of the stage was from the epic poem. Narration, doubtless, preceded acting, and gave laws to it: what at first was told artfully, was, in process of time, represented gracefully to the sight and hearing. Those episodes of Homer, which were proper for the stage, the poets amplified each into an action; out of his limbs they formed their bodies; what he had contracted, they enlarged; out of one Hercules, were made infinity of pygmies, yet all endued with human souls; for from him, their great creator, they have each of them the _divinæ particulam auræ_. They flowed from him at first, and are at last resolved into him. Nor were they only animated by him, but their measure and symmetry was owing to him. His one, entire, and great action, was copied by them according to the proportions of the drama. If he finished his orb within the year, it sufficed to teach them, that their action being less, and being also less diversified with incidents, their orb, of consequence, must be circumscribed in a less compass, which they reduced within the limits either of a natural or an artificial day; so that, as he taught them to amplify what he had shortened, by the same rule, applied the contrary way, he taught them to shorten what he had amplified. Tragedy is the miniature of human life; an epic poem is the draught at length.[31] Here, my lord, I must contract also; for, before I was aware, I was almost running into a long digression, to prove, that there is no such absolute necessity that the time of a stage action should so strictly be confined to twenty-four hours, as never to exceed them, for which Aristotle contends, and the Grecian stage has practised. Some longer space, on some occasions, I think, may be allowed, especially for the English theatre, which requires more variety of incidents than the French. Corneille himself, after long practice, was inclined to think, that the time allotted by the ancients was too short to raise