Ir is required by Aristotle to the perfection of a tragedy, and is equally necessary to every other species of regular composition, that it should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. "The beginning," says he, "is that which has nothing necessarily previous, but to which that which follows is naturally consequent; the end, on the contrary, is that which by necessity, or at least according to the common course of things, succeeds something else, but which implies nothing consequent to itself; the middle is connected on one side to something that naturally goes before, and on the other to something that naturally follows it."

Such is the rule laid down by this great critic, for the disposition of the different parts of a wellconstituted fable. It must begin, where it may be made intelligible without introduction; and end, where the mind is left in repose, without expectation of any farther event. The intermediate passages must join the last effect to the first cause, by a regular and unbroken concatenation; nothing must be therefore inserted which does not apparently arise from something foregoing, and properly make way for something

that succeeds it.

authority can make error venerable, his works are the proper objects of critical inquisition. To expunge faults where there are no excellences, is a task equally useless with that of the chemist, who employs the arts of separation and refinement upon ore in which no precious metal is contained to reward his preparations.

The tragedy of Samson Agonistes has been celebrated as the second work of the great author of "Paradise Lost," and opposed, with all the confidence of triumph, to the dramatic performances of other nations. It contains indeed just sentiments, maxims of wisdom, and oracles of piety, and many passages written with the ancient spirit of choral poetry, in which there is a just and pleasing mixture of Seneca's moral declamation, with the wild enthusiasm of the Greek writers. It is therefore worthy of examination, whether a performance thus illuminated with genius, and enriched with learning, is composed according to the indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism: and, omitting at present all other considerations, whether it exhibits a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The beginning is undoubtedly beautiful and proper, opening with a graceful abruptness, and proceeding naturally to a mournful recital of facts necessary to be known.

Samson. A little onward lend thy guiding hand
To these dark steps, a little farther on;
For yonder bank hath choice of sun and shade;
There I am wont to sit when any chance
Relieves me from my task of servile toil,
Daily in the common prison else enjoin'd me.-
-O wherefore was my birth from heaven foretold
Twice by an angel!-

-Why was my breeding order'd and prescribed,
As of a person separate to God,

Design'd for great exploits; if I must die
Betray'd, captived, and both my eyes put out
-Whom have I to complain of but myself?
Who this high gift of strength, committed to me,
In what part lodg'd, how easily bereft me
Under the seat of silence could not keep,
But weakly to a woman must reveal it."

His soliloquy is interrupted by a chorus or company of men of his own tribe, who condole his miseries, extenuate his fault, and conclude with This precept is to be understood in its rigour a solemn vindication of Divine justice. So that only with respect to great and essential events, at the conclusion of the first act there is no deand cannot be extended in the same force to mi-sign laid, no discovery made, nor any disposition nuter circumstances and arbitrary decorations, formed towards the subsequent event. which yet are more happy, as they contribute In the second act, Manoah, the father of Sammore to the main design; for it is always a proof son, comes to seek his son, and, being shown of extensive thought and accurate circumspec-him by the chorus, breaks out into lamentations tion, to promote various purposes by the same of his misery, and comparisons of his present act; and the idea of an ornament admits use, with his former state, representing to him the though it seems to exclude necessity. ignominy which his religion suffers, by the festiWhoever purposes, as it is expressed by Mil-val this day celebrated in honour of Dagon, to ton, to build the lofty rhyme, must acquaint him- whom the idolaters ascribed his overthrow. self with this law of poetical architecture, and take care that his edifice be 'solid as well as beautiful; that nothing stand single or independent, so as that it may be taken away without injuring the rest; but that, from the foundation to the pinnacles, one part rest firm upon another.

This regular and consequential distribution is, among common authors, frequently neglected; but the failures of those, whose example can have no influence, may be safely overlooked, nor is it of much use to recall obscure and unregarded names to memory for the sake of sporting with their infamy. But if there is any writer whose genius can embellish impropriety, and whose

-Thou bear'st

Enough, and more, the burden of that fault;
Bitterly hast thou paid and still art paying
That rigid score. A worse thing yet remains:
This day the Philistines a popular feast
Here celebrate in Gaza; and proclaim
Great pomp and sacrifice, and praises loud
To Dagon, as their god, who hath deliver'd
Thee, Samson, bound and blind, into their hands,
Them out of thine, who slew'st them many a slain.

Samson, touched with this reproach, makes a reply equally penitential and pious, which his father considers as the effusion of prophetic confidence.

Of all these boasted trophies won on me.

Our law, or stain my vow of Nazarite.
If there be ought of presage in the mind,
This day will be remarkable in my life,
By some great act, or of my days the last.

While Samson is conducted off by the messen

Manoah. With cause this hope relieves thee, and these ger, his father returns with hopes of success in

words

I as a prophecy receive; for God,

Nothing more certain, will not long defer,
To vindicate the glory of his name.

his solicitation, upon which he confers with the chorus till their dialogue is interrupted, first by a shout of triumph, and afterwards by screams of horror and agony. As they stand deliberating This part of the dialogue, as it might tend to where they shall be secure, a man who had animate or exasperate Samson, cannot, I think, been present at the show enters, and relates how be censured as wholly superfluous; but the suc- Samson, having prevailed on his guide to suffer ceeding dispute, in which Samson contends to him to lean against the main pillars of the thea die, and which his father breaks off, that he maytrical edifice, tore down the roof upon the spec go to solicit his release, is only valuable for its tators and himself. own beauties, and has no tendency to introduce any thing that follows it.

The next event of the drama is the arrival of Delilah, with all her graces, artifices, and allurements. This produces a dialogue, in a very high degree elegant and instructive, from which she retires, after she has exhausted her persuasions, and is no more seen nor heard of; nor has her visit any effect but that of raising the character

of Samson.

In the fourth act enters Harapha, the giant of Gath, whose name had never been mentioned before, and who has now no other motive of coming than to see the man whose strength and actions are so loudly celebrated:

-Those two massy pillars,
With horrible confusion, to and fro
He tugg'd, he shook, till down they came, and drew
The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder,
Upon the heads of all who sat beneath.-

-Samson, with these immixt, inevitably
Pull'd down the same destruction on himself.

This is undoubtedly a just and regular catas trophe, and the poem, therefore, has a beginning and an end which Aristotle himself could not have disapproved; but it must be allowed to want a middle, since nothing passes between the first act and the last, that either hastens or delays the death of Samson. The whole drama, if its superfluities were cut of, would scarcely fill a single act; yet this is the tragedy which igno rance has admired, and bigotry applauded.

No. 140.] SATURDAY, JULY 20, 1751.

Samson challenges him to the combat; and, af-
ter an interchange of reproaches, elevated by re-
peated defiance on one side, and embittered by
contemptuous insults on the other, Harapha re-Ir
tires; we then hear it determined, by Samson
and the chorus, that no consequence good or bad
will proceed from their interview:

Chorus. He will directly to the lords, I fear,
And with malicious counsel stir them up
Some way or other farther to afflict thee.
Sams. He must allege some cause, and offered fight
Will not dare mention, lest a question rise,
Whether he durst accept the offer or not;
And that he durst not, plain enough appear'd.

At last, in the fifth act, appears a messenger from the lords, assembled at the festival of Dagon, with a summons by which Samson is required to come and entertain them with some proof of his strength. Samson, after a short expostulation, dismisses him with a firm and resolute refusal; but, during the absence of the messenger, having awhile defended the propriety of his conduct, he at last declares himself moved by a secret impulse to comply, and utters some dark presages of a great event to be brought to pass by his agency, under the direction of Pro

vidence.

Sams. Be of good courage; I begin to feel
Some rousing motions in me, which dispose
To something extraordinary my thoughts.
I with this messenger will go along,
Nothing to do, be sure, that may dishonour

is common, says Bacon, to desire the end without enduring the means. Every member of society feels and acknowledges the necessity of detecting crimes; yet scarce any degree of virtue or reputation is able to secure an informer from public hatred. The learned world has always admitted the usefulness of critical disquisitions, yet he that attempts to show, however modestly, the failures of a celebrated writer, shall surely irritate his admirers, and incur the imputation of envy, captiousness and malignity.

With this danger full in my view, I shall proceed to examine the sentiments of Milton's tragedy, which, though much less liable to censure than the disposition of his plan, are, like those of other writers, sometimes exposed to just exceptions for want of care, or want of discernment. Sentiments are proper and improper as they consist more or less with the character and cir cumstances of the person to whom they are attributed, with the rules of the composition in which they are found, or with the settled and unalterable nature of things.

It is common among the tragic poets to introduce their persons alluding to events or opinions, of which they could not possibly have any knowledge. The barbarians of remote or newly-discovered regions often display their skill in European learning. The god of love is mentioned in

Tamerlane with all the familiarity of a Roman | which, depending only upon sounds, lose their epigrammatist; and a late writer has put Har-existence by the change of a syllable. Of this vey's doctrine of the circulation of the blood into kind, is the following dialogue:

Since I have thus pointed out the faults of Milton, critical integrity requires that I should All allusions to low and trivial objects, with endeavour to display his excellences, though which contempt is usually associated, are doubt- they will not easily be discovered in short quoless unsuitable to a species of composition which tations, because they consist in the justness of ought to be always awful though not always diffuse reasonings, or in the contexture and memagnificent. The remark therefore of the cho-thod of continued dialogues; this play having rus on good and bad news seems to want ele

none of those descriptions, similes, or splendid sentences, with which other tragedies are so lavishly adorned.

Yet some passages may be selected which seem to deserve particular notice, either as containing sentiments of passion, representations of life, precepts of conduct, or sallies of imagination. It is not easy to give a stronger represen

tation of the weariness of despondency, than in | No. 141.] the words of Samson to his father:

Such are the faults and such the beauties of Samson Agonistes, which I have shown with no other purpose than to promote the knowledge of true criticism. The everlasting verdure of Milton's laurels has nothing to fear from the blasts of malignity; nor can my attempt produce any other effect, than to strengthen their shoots by lopping their luxuriance.

negligence, and repressed my sallies with super-sack vacuity; who is obliged to continue his talk cilious gravity; yet having natural good-humour when his meaning is spent, to raise merriment lurking in his heart, he could not long hold out without images, to harass his imagination in against the power of hilarity, but after a few quest of thoughts which he cannot start, and months began to relax the muscles of disciplina- his memory in pursuit of narratives which he rian moroseness, received me with smiles after cannot overtake; observe the effort with which an elopement, and that he might not betray his he strains to conceal despondency by a smile, trust to his fondness, was content to spare my and the distress in which he sits while the eyes diligence by increasing his own. of the company are fixed upon him as their last refuge from silence and dejection.

Thus I continued to dissipate the gloom of collegiate austerity, to waste my own life in idleness, and lure others from their studies, till the happy hour arrived when I was sent to London. I soon discovered the town to be the proper element of youth and gayety, and was quickly distinguished as a wit by the ladies, a species of beings only heard of at the university, whom I had no sooner the happiness of approaching than I devoted all my faculties to the ambition of pleasing them.

It were endless to recount the shifts to which I have been reduced, or to enumerate the different species of artificial wit. I regularly frequented coffee-houses, and have often lived a week upon an expression, of which he who dropped it did not know the value. When fortune did not favour my erratic industry, I gleaned jests at home from obsolete farces. To collect wit was indeed safe, for I consorted with none that looked much into books, but to disperse it was the difficulty. A seeming negligence was often useful, and I have very successfully made a reply not to what the lady had said, but to what it was convenient for me to hear; for very few were so perverse as to rectify a mistake which had given occasion to a burst of merriment. Sometimes I drew the conversation up by degrees to a proper point, and produced a conceit which I had treasured up, like sportsmen who boast of killing the foxes which they lodge in the covert. Eminence is however, in some happy moments, gained at less expense; I have delighted a whole circle at one time with a series of quibbles, and made myself good company at another by scalding my fingers, or mistaking a lady's lap for my own chair.

A wit, Mr. Rambler, in the dialect of ladies, is not always a man who by the action of a vigorous fancy upon comprehensive knowledge brings distant ideas unexpectedly together, who by some peculiar acuteness discovers resemblances in objects dissimilar to common eyes, or, by mixing heterogeneous notions, dazzles the attention with sudden scintillations of conceit, A lady's wit is a man who can make ladies laugh, to which, however easy it may seem, many gifts of nature and attainments of art must commonly concur. He that hopes to be received as a wit in female assemblies should have a form neither so amiable as to strike with admiration, nor so coarse as to raise disgust, with an understanding too feeble to be dreaded, and too forcible to be despised. The other parts of the character are more sub- These are artful deceits and useful expedients; ject to variation: it was formerly essential to a but expedients are at length exhausted, and dewit, that half his back should be covered with a ceits detected. Time itself, among other injusnowy fleece; and at a time vet more remote, ries, diminishes the power of pleasing, and I now no man was a wit without his boots. In the find, in my forty-fifth year, many pranks and days of the "Spectator" a snuff box seems to be pleasantries very coldly received, which had forindispensable; but in my time an embroidered merly filled a whole room with jollity and accla coat was sufficient, without any precise regula-mation. I am under the melancholy necessity tion of the rest of his dress.

I am, &c.

PAPILIUS.

of supporting that character by study, which I But wigs and boots and snuff boxes are vain, gained by levity, having learned too late that without a perpetual resolution to be merry, and gayety must be recommended by higher quali who can always find supplies of mirth? Juve-ties, and that mirth can never please long but as nal, indeed, in his comparison of the two oppo- the efflorescence of a mind loved for its luxusite philosophers, wonders only whence an un- riance, but esteemed for its usefulness. exhausted fountain of tears could be discharged; but had Juvenal, with all his spirit, undertaken my province, he would have found constant gayety equally difficult to be supported. Consider, Mr. Rambler, and compassionate the condition of a man who has taught every company to expect from him a continual feast of laughter, an unintermitted stream of jocularity. The task of every other slave has an end. The rower in time reaches the port; the lexicographer at last finds the conclusion of his alphabet; only the hapless wit has his labour always to begin; the call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another.

No. 142.] SATURDAY, JULY 27, 1751.

Ενθα δ' ἀνὴρ ἐνίαυε πελώριος-οὐδὲ, μέτ' ἄλλους
Πωλεῖτ ̓ ἀλλ' ἀπάνευθεν ἐὼν ἀθεμίστια ἤδη
Καὶ γὰρ θαῦμ ̓ ἐτέτυκτο πελώριον, οὐδὲ ἐώκει
Ανερι σιτοφάγω.

A giant shepherd here his flock maintains,
Far from the rest, and solitary reigns,
In shelter thick of horrid shade reclined:
And gloomy mischiefs labour in his mind.
A form enormous! far unlike the race
Of human birth, in stature or in face.
TO THE RAMBLER.

HOMER.

POFE.

I know that among men of learning and asperity the retainers to the female world are not much regarded: yet I cannot but hope that, if you knew at how dear a rate our honours are SIR, purchased, you would look with some gratula- HAVING been accustomed to retire annually tion on our success, and with some pity on our from the town, I lately accepted the invitation miscarriages. Think on the misery of him who of Eugenio, who has an estate and seat in a disis condemned to cultivate barrenness and ran- tant county. As we were unwilling to travel