fragile and sickly, when it impedes the soul in its operations, and is the occasion of prejudicial judgments concerning it, that annoyance and pleasure melt into one another. The new result is not ridicule, but sympathy; and its object, who without this would only have been esteemed, becomes interesting. The misshapen sickly Pope must have been far more interesting to his friends, than the handsome and healthy Wycherly to his. But though it is not through mere ugliness that Thersites is made ridiculous, yet without it he would at once cease to be so. His ugliness, the harmony of this ugliness with his character, the contrast which both form with the idea which he cherishes of his own importance, the harmless effect of his malicious chattering, which mortifies himself only, all combine to produce this result. The last circumstance is the ov paprikov, which Aristotle considers indispensable to the ridiculous; as my friend makes it also a necessary condition that the contrast should not be of great importance, or inspire us with too much interest. For let us only assume that even Thersites paid more dearly than he did for his malicious depreciation of Agamemnon, and atoned for it with his life, instead of a pair of bloody wheals, and we should at once cease to laugh at him. For this horror of a man is still a man, whose annihilation must always appear a greater evil to us, than all his defects and vices. In De Poetica, cap. v.

b

b

order to experience this, let any one read the account of his end in Quintus Calaber. Achilles is grieved at having slain Penthesilea; the beauty, bathed in her own blood so bravely shed, demands the esteem and compassion of the hero; and esteem and compassion beget love. But the slanderous Thersites imputes this to him as a crime. He grows zealous against the lust which can lead even the most noble of men to madness :

ἦτ ̓ ἄφρονα φωτὰ τίθησι

καὶ πινυτόν Пер ἔοντα.

Achilles is angered, and, without adding a word, strikes him so heavily between the cheek and ear, that his teeth and blood and life issue together from his mouth. It is too horrible! The passionate and murderous Achilles becomes more hateful to us than the malicious and snarling Thersites. The shout of applause, which the Greeks raise at this, offends us; We step to the side of Diomede, who already draws his sword, to take vengeance on the murderer of his relation; for we feel that Thersites is our relation too,

a man.

But let us suppose that the instigations of Thersites had resulted in a mutiny; that the rebellious people had really embarked in their ships, and treacherously left their leaders behind them; that these leaders had fallen into the hands of a revengeful

Paralipomena, lib. i. 720.

enemy; and that thereupon a divine decree of punishment had wreaked utter destruction on the fleet and people. How would the ugliness of Thersites appear then? If ugliness, when harmless, may be ridiculous; when hurtful it is always horrible. I do not know how I can better illustrate this than by citing a couple of excellent passages from Shakspeare. Edmund, the bastard of the count of Gloucester, in King Lear, is no less a villain than Richard Duke of Gloucester, who paved his path to the throne by the most horrible crimes, and mounted it under the title of Richard the Third. How is it then that the first excites our loathing and horror so much less than the second? When I hear the bastard say, Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound; wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom; and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me, For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base? When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous, and my shape as true As honest Madam's issue? Why brand they thus With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base? Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take More composition and fierce quality,

d

Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got 'tween asleep and wake?

d King Lear, Act i. sc. 2.

I am listening to a devil, but see him in the form of an angel of light. When, on the contrary, I hear the Duke of Gloucester:

But I,—that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty ;
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time.
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionably,

That dogs bark at me, as I halt by them;
Why I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time;
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity;
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair, well-spoken days,—
I am determined to prove a villain !

I hear a fiend, and I see a fiend; and in a form which a fiend alone could possess.

e King Richard, the Third, Act i. sc. 1.

CHAPTER XXIV.

IT is thus that the poet turns ugliness of form to account. We will now inquire what use the artist may be allowed to make of it?

Painting, as an imitative power, can express ugliness; but painting as a fine art refuses to do so; as in the first capacity, all visible objects may be subjects for it; in the second, it is confined to those only by which pleasing sensations are awakened.

But do not even disagreeable sensations become pleasing, when imitated? Not all. An acute critica has already made the following remarks upon aversion. The representations," he says, "of fear, sorrow, alarm, compassion, &c., can only so far "awaken dislike, as we believe the evil to be real. "These, therefore, might, through the recollection "that it is nothing but an artificial illusion, dissolve "into sensations of pleasure. But the disagreeable "sensation of disgust follows, owing to the in"fluence which a mere representation, operating "on the imagination, exercises over the soul, "whether the object be considered real or not. a Letters on Modern Literature, vol. v. p. 102.