FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Dr. Johnson’s Preface first appeared in 1765.  Malone’s Shakespeare,
    i. 108. and Boswell’s Life of Johnson, i.

[2] Est vetus atque probus, centum qui perficit annos.  Hon. Ep.  II. 1.
    v. 39.

[3] With all respect for our great critic’s memory we must maintain,
    that love has the greatest influence on the sum of life:  and every
    popular tale or poem derives its main charm and power of pleasing
    from the incidents of this universal passion.  Other passions have,
    undoubtedly, their sway, but love, when it does prevail, like
    Aaron’s rod, swallows up every feeling beside.  It is one thing to
    introduce the fulsome badinage of compliment with which French
    tragedy abounds, and another to exhibit the

 —­“very ecstacy of love: 
  Whose violent property foredoes itself,
  And leads the will to desperate undertakings,
  As oft as any passion under heaven,
  That does afflict our natures.”—­

HAMLET.  Act ii.  Sc. i.

[4]
    Quaerit quod nusquam est gentium, repent tamen. 
    Facit illud verisimile, quod mendacrium est. 
                           PLAUTI PSEUDOLUS, Act i.  Sc. 4.

Ficta voluptatis causa, sint proxima veris.  HOR.  ARS POET, 338.

See too the celebrated passage of Shakespeare himself—­
Midsummer-night’s Dream, Act v.  Sc. 1; and Idler, 84.—­Ed.

[5] The judgment of French poets on these points may be inferred from
    the tenour of Boileau’s admonitions: 

Gardez donc de donner, ainsi que dans Clelie,
L’air ni l’esprit francois a l’antique Italie;
Et, sous des noms romains faisant notre portrait,
Peindre Caton galant, et Brutus dameret. 

                        Art Poetique, iii.—­Ed.

[6] The critic must, when he wrote this, have forgotten the Cyclops of
    Euripides, and also the fact, that when an Athenian dramatist
    brought out his three tragedies at the Dionysiac festival, he
    added, as a fourth, a sort of farce; a specimen of which Schlegel
    considers the Cyclops.  Mr. Twining, in his amusing and instructive
    notes on Aristotle’s Poetics, refers to the drunken jollity of
    Hercules in the Alcestis, and to the ludicrous dialogue between
    Ulysses and Minerva, in the first scene of the Ajax of Sophocles, as
    instances of Greek tragi-comedy.  We may add the Electra of
    Euripides; for if the poet did not intend to burlesque the rules of
    tragic composition in many of the scenes of that play, and to make
    his audience laugh, he calculated on more dull gravity in Athens,
    than we are accustomed to give that city of song the credit for.  The
    broad ridicule which Aristophanes casts against the tragedians is
    not half so laughable.