University of Virginia Library

Fors fuat pol! Madam Dacier refines prodigiously on these three words, and supposing great difficulty in them, explains them by a very long periphrasis. Donatus seems to consider them as mere words of assent, agreeable to the mild character of Sostrata; and if I might venture to correct a French translation, I would say that Madam Dacier might have rendered them more properly by the common expression of A la bonne heure!

Odiosa hæc est ætas adolescentulis. E medio æquom excedere est. Postremo jam nos fabulæ sumus, Pamphile, Senex atque Anus. There is nothing, I suppose, in these words, which provokes a smile. Yet the humour is strong. In his solicitude to promote his son's satisfaction, he lets fall a sentiment truly characteristick, and which old men usually take great pains to conceal; I mean the acknowledgment of that suspicious fear of contempt, which is natural to old age. So true a picture of life in the representation of this weakness, might, in other circumstances, have created some pleasantry; but the occasion, which forced it from him, discovering, at the same time, the amiable disposition of the speaker, covers the ridicule of it, or more properly converts it into an object of esteem.

I cannot help thinking that the latter part of this ingenious remark is rather too refined. If the characteristick humour of the passage is strong, the ridicule seems rather intended to be heightened by the comick turn of expression. The complections of men are so different, and the muscles of some are so much more easily relaxed into a smile than those of others, that it is difficult to pronounce exactly in what degree such a sober piece of pleasantry would act upon them. But there are many instances of passages of true humour, which do not immediately raise a laugh, or even provoke a smile: and it is sufficient if they are conceived in the same vein of pleasantry, that runs though the rest of the work. The stroke of character before us seems to me to be just in the same stile with that which this critick takes notice of, in the third act, and of which he says, that “it is an observation drawn naturally and forcibly from Laches;—and this too without design; which is important, and shews the distinction of what, in the more restrained sense of the word, we call humour, from other modes of pleasantry.”