It is necessary therefore for a poet, who would concern an audience by describing of a passion, first to prepare it, and not to rush upon it all at once.  Ovid has judiciously shown the difference of these two ways, in the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses:  Ajax, from the very beginning, breaks out into his exclamations, and is swearing by his Maker,—­Agimus, proh Jupiter, inquit. Ulysses, on the contrary, prepares his audience with all the submissiveness he can practise, and all the calmness of a reasonable man; he found his judges in a tranquillity of spirit, and therefore set out leisurely and softly with them, till he had warmed them by degrees; and then he began to mend his pace, and to draw them along with his own impetuousness:  yet so managing his breath, that it might not fail him at his need, and reserving his utmost proofs of ability even to the last.  The success, you see, was answerable; for the crowd only applauded the speech of Ajax;—­

  Vulgique secutum ultima murmur erat:—­

But the judges awarded the prize, for which they contended, to Ulysses;

  Mota manus procerum est; et quid facundia posset
  Tum patuit, fortisque viri tulit arma disertus.

The next necessary rule is, to put nothing into the discourse, which may hinder your moving of the passions.  Too many accidents, as I have said, incumber the poet, as much as the arms of Saul did David; for the variety of passions, which they produce, are ever crossing and justling each other out of the way.  He, who treats of joy and grief together, is in a fair way of causing neither of those effects.  There is yet another obstacle to be removed, which is,—­pointed wit, and sentences affected out of season; these are nothing of kin to the violence of passion:  no man is at leisure to make sentences and similes, when his soul is in an agony.  I the rather name this fault, that it may serve to mind me of my former errors; neither will I spare myself, but give an example of this kind from my “Indian Emperor.”  Montezuma, pursued by his enemies, and seeking sanctuary, stands parleying without the fort, and describing his danger to Cydaria, in a simile of six lines;

  As on the sands the frighted traveller
  Sees the high seas come rolling from afar, &c.

My Indian potentate was well skilled in the sea for an inland prince, and well improved since the first act, when he sent his son to discover it.  The image had not been amiss from another man, at another time:  Sed nunc non erat his locus: he destroyed the concernment which the audience might otherwise have had for him; for they could not think the danger near, when he had the leisure to invent a simile.