There are other parts of nature, which are meaner, and yet are the subjects both of painters and of poets. For, to proceed in the parallel; as comedy is a representation of human life in inferior persons, and low subjects, and by that means creeps into the nature of poetry, and is a kind of juniper, a shrub belonging to the species of cedar, so is the painting of clowns, the representation of a Dutch kermis,[124] the brutal sport of snick-or-snee, and a thousand other things of this mean invention; a kind of picture which belongs to nature, but of the lowest form. Such is a lazar in comparison to a Venus: both are drawn in human figures; they have faces alike, though not like faces. There is yet a lower sort of poetry and painting, which is out of nature; for a farce is that in poetry, which grotesque is in a picture. The persons and action of a farce are all unnatural, and the manners false, that is, inconsisting with the characters of mankind. Grotesque painting is the just resemblance of this; and Horace begins his “Art of Poetry” by describing such a figure, with a man’s head, a horse’s neck, the wings of a bird, and a fish’s tail; parts of different species jumbled together, according to the mad imagination of the dauber; and the end of all this, as he tells you afterward, to cause laughter: a very monster in a Bartholomew-fair, for the mob to gape at for their two-pence. Laughter is indeed the propriety of a man, but just enough to distinguish him from his elder brother with four legs. It is a kind of bastard-pleasure too, taken in at the eyes of the vulgar gazers, and at the ears of the beastly audience. Church-painters use it to divert the honest countryman at public prayers, and keep his eyes open at a heavy sermon; and farce scribblers make use of the same noble invention, to entertain citizens, country-gentlemen, and Covent-Garden fops. If they are merry, all goes well on the poet’s side. The better sort go thither too, but in despair of sense and the just images of nature, which are the adequate pleasures of the mind; but the author can give the stage no better than what was given him by nature; and the actors must represent such things as they are capable to perform, and by which both they and the scribbler may get their living. After all, it is a good thing to laugh at any rate; and if a straw can tickle a man, it is an instrument of happiness. Beasts can weep when they suffer, but they cannot laugh. And as Sir William D’Avenant observes in his Preface to “Gondibert,” “It is the wisdom of a government to permit plays, (he might have added—farces,) as it is the prudence of a carter to put bells upon his horses, to make them carry their burthens cheerfully.”