"TRAGEDY (according to the ancient definition quoted in a former paper) purges the passions, by exciting them." Comedy wishes to purge vices and follies, by ridicule. In a corrupt age, reason is so weak as to be obliged to call in such allies to her assistance: let her beware that they do not, like the Saxon auxiliaries of our

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ancestors, usurp the government which they were called to defend.

In the earliest periods of life, ridicule is naturally employed against reason and propriety. The child who obeys its mother, who is afraid of its governess, who will not be concerned in little plots to deceive both, is laughed at by its bolder and less scrupulous companions.

At

every age, reason and duty are grave and serious things, in which ridicule finds a contrast that renders her attack more easy, and her sallies more poignant.

The refinement of polished times, as was observed in the foregoing Number, does not allow them to find amusement in that gross ridicule which provokes the laughter of a ruder people. But from this very source their subjects of comedy are often of a dangerous kind. They trench upon sacred ground; I mean not as to religion, but in morals; they paint those nicer shades of ridicule, which are of an

equivocal sort, between virtue and vice, and often give the spectator leave to laugh, according to his own humour, either at the first or the latter.

In the Ecole des Femmes, (and I shall hardly be reckoned unfair when I make the reference to Moliere,) most of the maxims which Arnolphe makes Agnes read, are really good moral precepts, which a prudent wife would do well to follow, for her own sake as well as her husband's. There is just as much prudery and suspicion thrown into them, as to allow those who would wish to be less guarded than a good wife ought to be, to hold them in derision.

The George Dandin of the same author has been already criticised, in this moral view, by a very able writer. But he has not attended, say its defenders, to the proper moral of the piece; which is to correct a very common sort of weakness, as well as of injustice, in old men of low