The Round Table; Northcote's Conversations. Characteristics

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: critical essays we do not think quite so good. We prefer Steele's occasional selection of beautiful poetical passages, without any affectation of analysing their beauties, to Addison's fine-spun theories. The best criticism in the ' Spectator, ' that on the Cartoons of Raphael, is by Steele. We owed this acknowledgment to a writer who has so often put us in good humour with ourselves and everything about us, when few things else could.1 No. IV. On Modern Comedy. The question which has often been asked, are so few good modern Comedies? appears in a great measure to answer itself. It is because so many ex- written, that .there areHone wjitten at present. Comedy naturally wears itself out ? destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and 6uccessfutlyoxposing th b' follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at. It holds the mirror up jo nature; and men, seeing their most strikmg pflpuli-aritlna and clefecfe passfin gay rjjqv hnfora tlipm learn ftither toTavoicTor' conceal the, m. It is not the criticism which the public taste exercises upon the stage, but the criticism which the stage exercises upon public manners, that is fatal to comedy, by rendering the subject-matter of it tame, correct, and spiritless. Wo are drilled into a sort of stupid decorum, and forced to wear the same 1 Wo had in our hands the other dny an original copy of tba ' Tatler, ' nnd a list of the subscribers. It is curious to sec some names there which we should hardly think of (thnt of Sir Isaac Newton is among them), and also to observe the degrec of interest excited by those of the different persons, which is not adjusted according to the rules of the Heralds' College. dull uniform of outward appearance; and yet it is asked..