Si sic omnia dixisset! n This is wit in all languages: it is like Mercury, never to be lost or killed:— and so that other—
For beauty, like white powder, makes no noise,
And yet the silent hypocrite destroys.
You see, the last line is highly metaphorical, but it is so soft and gentle, that it does not shock us as we read it.
'But, to return from whence I have digressed, to the consideration of the ancients' writing, and their wit; (of which by this time you will grant us in some measure to be fit judges.) Though I see many excellent thoughts in Seneca, yet he of them who had a genius most proper for the stage, was Ovid; he had a way of writing so fit to stir up a pleasing admiration and concernment, which are the objects of a tragedy, and to shew the various movements of a soul combating betwixt two different passions, that, had he lived in our age, or in his own could have writ with our advantages, no man but must have yielded to him; and therefore I am confident the Medea n is none of his: for, though I esteem it for the gravity and sententiousness of it, which he himself concludes to be suitable to a tragedy,—Omne genus scripti gravitate tragædia vincit n,—yet it moves not my soul enough to judge that he, who in the epick way wrote things so near the drama as the story of Myrrha, of Caunus and Biblis, and the rest, should stir up no more concernment where he most endeavoured it n. The master-piece of Seneca I hold to be that scene in the Troades, where Ulysses is seeking for Astyanax to kill him: there you see the
