propose.

Come, my old friend, take down your hortus siccus: the live plants you would gather do both stink and sting: prythee leave them to wither or to rot, or to be plucked and collated by more rustic hands.

Marvel. I entertain an utter contempt for the populace, whether in robes or tatters; whether the face be bedaubed with cinnabar or with dirt from the alleys and shops. It appears to me, however, that there is as much difference between tragedy and comedy as between the heavens and the clouds; and that comedy draws its life from its mobility. We must take manners as we find them, and copy from the individual, not the speeies; into which fault Menander fell and seduced his followers. The characters whereon he raised his glory are trivial and contemptible.

Dum fallax servus, durus pater, improba lena Vivent, dum meretrix blanda, Menander erit. His wisdom towered high above them, and he clothed with smiles what Euripides charged with spleen. The beauty of his moral sentences was hurtful to the spirit of comedy, and I am convinced that, if we could recover his works, we should find them both less facetious and less dramatic than those of Plautus. Once, by way of experiment, I attempted to imitate his manner, as far as I could judge of it from the fragments we possess. I will give you a specimen: it is the best I have.

Friendship, in each successive stage of life,
As we approach him, varies to the view:
In youth he wears the face of Love himself,
Of Love without his arrows and his wings;
Soon afterward with Bacchus and with Pan
Thou findest him, or hearest him resign
To some dog-pastor by the quiet fire,
(With much good-will and jocular adieu)
His ageworn mule or brokenhearted steed.
Fly not, as thou wert wont, to his embrace,
Lest, after one long yawning gaze, he swear
Thou art the best good fellow in the world,
But he had quite forgotten thee, by Jove!
Or laughter wag his newly-bearded chin
At recollection of his childish hours,
But wouldst thou see, young man, his latest form,
When e'en this laughter, e'en this memory fails?
Look at yon figtree statue, golden once,
As all would deem it; rottenness falls out
At every little chink the worms have made,
And if thou triest to lift it up again

It breaks upon thee. Leave it, touch it not,
Its very lightness would encumber thee:
Come, thou hast seen it; 'tis enough; away!

Marvel. Yet if it were spoken on our stage, I should be condemned as a man ignorant of the art; and justly too; for it accords not with its complexion. Inevitable events and natural reflections, but reflections not exhibited before, and events not expected, please me better than the most demonstrable facts, the most sober truths, the most clever improbabilities, and the most acute repartees. In comedy we should oftener raise reflections than present them. Now for plot.

Intricacy was always held necessary on the modern stage, and the more so when delicacy was the least. It was however so difficult to make the audience keep watch and ward for it, and to command an uninterrupted attention for five whole acts, that many of the best writers, from Terence to the present age, have combined two plots, hoping that what is twisted together will untwist together, and leaving a great deal to the goodness of Providence, and to the faith and charity of their fellow creatures.

Milton. True enough. Your plotters bring many great changes into many whole families, and sometimes into several and distant countries, within the day; and, what is more difficult and incredible, send off all parties well satisfied, excepting one scape-goat. For my own share I am contented with seeing a fault wittily rebuked and checked effectually, and think that surprising enough, considering the time employed in doing it, without the formation of attachments, the begetting or finding of children, bickerings, buffetings, deaths, marriages, distresses, wealth again, love again, whims and suspicions, shaking heads, and shaking hands. These things are natural, I confess it; but one would rather breathe between them, and perhaps one would think it no bad husbandry to put some of them off until another season. The combination of them, marvellous as it appears, is less difficult to contrive than to credit.

Marvel. I have always been an idle man, and have read or attended the greater part of the plays that are extant, and will venture to affirm that, exclusive of Shakspeare's and some Spanish pieces never represented nor translated, there are barely half a dozen plots among them, comic and tragic. So that it is evidently a much easier matter to run over the usual variations, than to keep entirely in another tune, and to raise up no recollections. Both in tragedies and comedies the changes are pretty similar, and nearly in the same places. You perceive the turns and windings of the road a mile before you, and you know exactly the precipice down which the hero or heroine must fall. You can discover with your naked eye, who does the mischief and who affords the help; where the assassin bursts forth with the dagger, and where the old gentleman shakes the crabstick over the shoulder of his dissolute nephew.

Milton. I do not wish direction-posts to perplexities and intrigues: I oppose this agrarian law,

Milton. No, Marvel, no. Between their poetry and ours you perceive as great a difference as between a rose and a dandelion. There is, if I may express myself so, without pursuing a metaphor till it falls exhausted at my feet, a sort of refreshing odour flying off it perpetually; not enough to oppress or to satiate; nothing is beaten or bruised; nothing smells of the stalk; the flower itself is half-concealed by the Genius of it hovering round. Write on the same principles as guided them.

Marvel. Yes; but I would not imitate them further. I will not be pegged down to any plot, nor follow any walk, however well rolled, where the persons of the drama can not consistently lead the way.

Milton. Reasonable enough: but why should not both comedy and tragedy be sometimes so disciplined as may better fit them for our closets? I allow that their general intention is for action: it is also the nature of odes to be accompanied by voices and instruments. I only would suggest to you that a man of learning, with a genius suited to comedy, may as easily found it upon antiquity as the tragedian of equal abilities his tragedy, and that the one might be made as acceptable to the study as the other to the stage. I would not hamper you with rules and precedents. Comply with no other laws or limits than such as are necessary to the action. There may be occasion for songs, and there may not; beside, a poet may be capable of producing a good comedy who is incapable of composing a tolerable stanza; and, on the other hand, Pindar himself might have been lost in a single scene.

Marvel. True: but tell me, friend John, are you really serious in your proposal of interspersing a few antiquated words, that my comedy may be acceptable to the readers of Plautus and Terence? This I hear.

Milton. I have, on several occasions, been a sufferer by the delivery of my sentiments to a friend. Antiquated words, used sparingly and characteristically, give often a force, and always a gravity, to composition. It is not every composition that admits them: a comedy may in one character, but charily and choicely.

There is in Plautus a great fund of language and of wit: he is far removed from our Shakspeare,

arises not so materially from the aptitude of character and expression, as from a clear and unobstructed insight into the feelings and manners of those ancient times, and an admission into the conversations to which Scipio and Lælius attended. You will carefully observe the proper and requisite unities, not according to the wry rigour of our neighbours, who never take up an old idea without some extravagance in its application. We would not draw out a conspiracy in the presence of those who are conspired against; nor hold it needful to call a council of postilions, before we decide on the distance we may allow to our heroes between the acts. Let others treat them as monkeys and parrots, loving to hear them chatter, tied by the leg. The music renders a removal of twenty or thirty miles, during the action, probable enough, unless you take out your watch, and look upon it while you are listening. In that case, although you oblige the poet to prove the pedigree of the horses, and to bring witnesses that such horses might go thus far without drawing bit, your reasons are insufficient by fifty minutes or an hour.

The historical dramas of Shakspeare should be designated by that name only, and not be called tragedies, lest persons who reflect little (and how few reflect much?) should try them by the rules of Aristoteles; which would be as absurd as to try a gem upon a touchstone. Shakspeare, in these particularly, but also in the rest, can only be relished by a people which retains its feelings and character in perfection. The French, more than any other, are transmuted by the stream that runs over them, like the baser metals. Beautiful poems, in dialogue too, may be composed on the greater part of a life, if that life be eventful, and if there be a proper choice of topics. Votivá veluti depicta tabellá.

No other than Shakspeare hath ever yet been able to give unceasing interest to similar pieces: but he has given it amply to such as understand him. Sometimes his levity (we hear) is misplaced. Human life is exhibited not only in its calamities and its cares, but in the gay unguarded hours of ebullient and confident prosperity; and we are the more deeply interested in the reverses of those whose familiarity we have long enjoyed, and whose festivity we have recently partaken.

Marvel. Now, what think you about the number of acts?

Milton. There is no reason, in nature or in art, why a drama should occupy five. Be assured, my friend Andrew, the fifth-act-men will hereafter be thought as absurd as the fifth-monarchy-men. The number of acts should be optional, like the number of scenes, and the division of them should equally be subordinate to the convenience of the poet in the procession of his events. In respect to duration, nothing is requisite or reasonable but that it should not loiter nor digress, and that it should not exhaust the patience nor disappoint

the expectation of the audience. Dramatists have gone to work in this business with so much less of wisdom than of system, that I question, when they say a comedy or tragedy in five acts, whether they should not rather say in five scenes; whether, in fact, the scenes should not designate the divisions, and the acts the subdivisions; for the scene usually changes to constitute a new act, and when a fresh actor enters we usually call it a new scene. I do not speculate on anyone carrying the identity of place strictly throughout a whole performance, least of all, a tragedy, unless for the purpose of ridiculing some late French critics. As a tragedy must consist of opposite counsels and unforeseen events, if the author should exhibit his whole action in one hall or chamber, he would be laughed to scorn. Comedy is not formed to astonish: she neither expects nor wishes great changes. Let

her argue rarely; let her remark lightly; if she reasons too well, her audience will leave her, and reflect upon it. Those generally are the most temperate who have large and well-stored cellars. You have everything at home, Andrew, and need not step out of your way. Those show that they possess much who hold much back.

Marvel. Be not afraid of me: I will not push my characters forward, and make them stare most one upon another when they are best acquainted. The union of wisdom with humour is unexpected enough for me. I would rather see it than the finest piece of arras slit asunder, or the richest screen in Christendom overturned; than the cleverest trick that was ever played among the scenes, or than a marriage that should surprise me like an Abyssinian's with a Laplander.

strongly in their old age at your exploits.

Franklin. Pleasantly they were spent indeed, but, you may well suppose, not entirely without anxiety. I thank God, however, that all this is over.

Washington. Yes, Benjamin, let us render thanks to the Disposer of events, under whom, by the fortitude, the wisdom, and the endurance of our Congress, the affairs of America are brought at last to a triumphant issue.

Franklin. Do not refuse the share of merit due to yourself, which is perhaps the largest.

Washington. I am not of that opinion: if I were, I might acknowledge it to you, although not to others. Suppose me to have made a judicious choice in my measures, the Congress then made a judicious choice in me so that whatever praise may be allowed me, is at best but secondary.

Franklin. I do not believe that the remainder of the world contains so many men who reason rightly as New England. Serious, religious, peaceable, inflexibly just and courageous, their stores of intellect are not squandered in the regions of fancy, nor in the desperate ventures of new-found and foggy metaphysics, but warehoused and kept sound at home, and ready to be brought forth in good and wholesome condition at the first demand. Their ancestors had abandoned their estates, their families, and their country, for the attainment of peace and freedom; and they themselves were ready to traverse the vast wildernesses of an unexplored continent, rather than submit to that moral degradation which alone can satisfy the capriciousness of despotism. Their gravity is converted into enthusiasm: even those among them who never in childhood itself expressed by speech or

Washington. Benjamin, one would imagine that we both had been educated in courts, and that I were a man who could give, and you a man who could ask. Prythee, my friend, be a philosopher in somewhat more than books and bottles, and, as you have learned to manage the clouds and lightnings, try an experiment on the management of your fancies. I declare on my conscience I do not know what I have done extraordinary, unless we are forced to acknowledge, from the examples to which we have been accustomed, that it is extraordinary to possess power and remain honest. I believe it may be: but this was a matter of reflection with me by serving my country I gratified my heart and all its wants. Perhaps I am not so happy a creature as he who smokes his pipe on the bench at the tavern-door; yet I am as happy as my slow blood allows; and I keep my store of happiness in the same temperature the whole year round, by the double casement of activity and integrity.

Franklin. I do not assert that there never was a general who disposed his army in the day of battle with skill equal to yours: which, in many instances, must depend almost as much on his adversary as on himself: but I assert that no man ever displayed such intimate knowledge of his whole business, guarded so frequently and so effectually against the impending ruin of his forces, and showed himself at once so circumspect and so daring. To have inoculated one half of your troops under the eye of the enemy.

Washington. Those actions are great, which require great calculation, and succeed in consequence of its correctness: those alone, or nearly alone, are called so, which succeed without any. I knew the supineness of the British general, his utter ignorance of his profession, his propensity to gaming, to drinking, in short to all the camp vices. I took especial care that he should be informed of

my intention to attack him, on the very day when my army was, from the nature of its distemper, the most disabled. Instead of anticipating me, which this intelligence, credited as it was, would have induced a more skilful man to do, he kept his troops unremittingly on the alert, and he himself is reported to have been sober three days together. The money which he ought to have employed in obtaining just and necessary information, he lost at cards; and when he heard that I had ventured to inoculate my army, and that the soldiers had recovered, he little imagined that half the number was at that moment under the full influence of the disease.

Attribute no small portion of our success to the only invariable policy of England, which is, to sweep forward to the head of her armaments the grubs of rotten boroughs and the droppings of the gaming-table; and, Benjamin, be assured that, although men of eminent genius have been guilty of all other vices, none worthy of more than a secondary name has ever been a gamester. Either an excess of avarice, or a deficiency of what in physics is called excitability, is the cause of it: neither of which can exist in the same bosom with genius, with patriotism, or with virtue. Clive, the best English general since Marlborough and Peterborough, was apparently an exception: but he fell not into this degrading vice until he was removed from the sphere of exertion, until his abilities had begun to decay, and his intellect in some measure to be deranged.

Franklin. I quite agree with you in your main proposition, and see no exception to it in Clive, who was more capable of ruining a country than of raising one. Those who record that chess was invented in the Trojan war, would have informed us if Ulysses, Agamemnon, or Diomedes ever played at it; which however is usually done with out a stake, nor can it be called in any way a game of chance. Gustavus Adolphus, and Eugene of Savoy, and Marlborough, and Frederick of Prussia, and Charles XII. of Sweden, and William III. of England, had springs and movements within themselves, which did not require to be wound up every night. They deemed it indecorous to be selvages to an ell of green cloth, and scandalous to cast upon a card what would cover a whole country with plenteousness.

employment. Republics, on the contrary, should punish the first offence with fine and imprisonment, the second with a public whipping and a year's hard labour, the third with deportation.

Washington. As you please in monarchies and republics: but prythee say nothing of them in mixed governments: do not affront the earliest coadjutors and surest reliances of our commonwealth. The leaders of party in England are inclined to play; and what was a cartouche but yesterday will make a rouleau to-morrow.

Franklin. Fill it then with base money, or you will be overreached, little as is the danger to be apprehended from them in any higher species of calculation. They are persons of some repute for eloquence; but if I conducted a newspaper in that country, I should think it a wild speculation to pay the wiser of them half-a-crown a-day for his most elaborate composition. When either shall venture to publish a history, or even a speech of his own, his talents will then be appreciated justly. God grant (for our differences have not yet annihilated the remembrance of our relationship) that England may never have any more painful proofs, any more lasting documents, of their incapacity. Since we Americans can suffer no farther from them, I speak of them with the same indifference and equanimity as if they were among the dead.

Washington. But come, come the war is ended: God be praised! Objections have been made against our form of government, and assertions have been added that the republican is illadapted to a flourishing or an extensive country. We know from the experience of Holland that it not only can preserve but can make a country flourishing, when Nature herself has multiplied the impediments, and when the earth and all the elements have conspired against it. Demonstration is indeed yet wanting that a very extensive territory is best governed by its people: reason and sound common-sense are the only vouchers. Many may fancy they have an interest in seizing what is another's; but surely no man can suppose that he has any in ruining or alienating his own.

Franklin. Confederate states, under one President, will never be all at once, or indeed in great part, deprived of their freedom.

Washington. Adventurers may aspire to the supreme power illegally; but none can expect that the majority will sacrifice their present interests to his ambition, in confidence or hope of greater. He never will raise a standing army who can not point out the probable means of paying it, which no one can do here; nor will a usurper rise up anywhere, unless there are mines to tempt the adventurous and avaricious, or estates to parcel out with labourers to cultivate them, or slaves to seduce and embody, or treasures to confiscate.