the discourse becomes vehement and lofty:  if otherwise, there is nothing more ridiculous than a great passion out of season:  and to this purpose he animadverts severely upon AEschylus, who writ nothing in cold blood, but was always in a rapture, and in fury with his audience:  the inspiration was still upon him, he was ever tearing it upon the tripos; or (to run off as madly as he does, from one similitude to another) he was always at high-flood of passion, even in the dead ebb, and lowest water-mark of the scene.  He who would raise the passion of a judicious audience, says a learned critic, must be sure to take his hearers along with him; if they be in a calm, ’tis in vain for him to be in a huff:  he must move them by degrees, and kindle with them; otherwise he will be in danger of setting his own heap of stubble on fire, and of burning out by himself, without warming the company that stand about him.  They who would justify the madness of poetry from the authority of Aristotle, have mistaken the text, and consequently the interpretation:  I imagine it to be false read, where he says of poetry, that it is [Greek:  Euphuous e manikou], that it had always somewhat in it either of a genius, or of a madman.  ’Tis more probable that the original ran thus, that poetry was [Greek:  Euphuous ou manikou], That it belongs to a witty man, but not to a madman.  Thus then the passions, as they are considered simply and in themselves, suffer violence when they are perpetually maintained at the same height; for what melody can be made on that instrument, all whose strings are screwed up at first to their utmost stretch, and to the same sound?  But this is not the worst:  for the characters likewise bear a part in the general calamity, if you consider the passions as embodied in them; for it follows of necessity, that no man can be distinguished from another by his discourse, when every man is ranting, swaggering, and exclaiming with the same excess:  as if it were the only business of all the characters to contend with each other for the prize at Billingsgate; or that the scene of the tragedy lay in Bethlem.  Suppose the poet should intend this man to be choleric, and that man to be patient; yet when they are confounded in the writing, you cannot distinguish them from one another:  for the man who was called patient and tame, is only so before he speaks; but let his clack be set a-going, and he shall tongue it as impetuously and as loudly, as the arrantest hero in the play.  By this means, the characters are only distinct in name; but, in reality, all the men and women in the play are the same person.  No man should pretend to write, who cannot temper his fancy with his judgment:  nothing is more dangerous to a raw horseman, than a hot-mouthed jade without a curb.