156 STUDIES OF NATURE. 



fliould perceive himfelf in the dramatic reprefenta- 

 tion, I do nor perceive how the reformation of 

 vice would enfue. How could it be imagined, 

 that the way for a phyîician to cure his patient, 

 would be to clap a mirror before his face, and 

 then laugh at him ? If my vice is held up as aa 

 objeâ; of ridicule, the laugh, fo far from giving 

 me a difguft at it, plunges me in the deeper. I 

 employ every effort to conceal it ; 1 become a hy- 

 pocrite : without taking into the account, that the 

 laugh is much more frequently levelled againfl: 

 virtue than againft vice. It is not the faithlefs wife, 

 or profligate (on who are held up to fcorn, but the 

 good-natured hulband, or the indulgent father. 

 In juftification of our own tafte, we refer to that of 

 the Greeks j but we forget that their idle fpec- 

 tacles direfted the public attention to the mod 

 frivolous objects ; that their flage frequently turned 

 into ridicule the virtue of the moft illuftrious citi- 

 zens ; and that their fcenic exhibitions multiplied 

 among them the averfions and the jealoufies which 

 accelerated their ruin. 



Not that I would reprefent laughing as a crime, 

 or that I believe, with Hobbes, it muft proceed 

 from pride. Children laugh, but moft afluredly 

 not from pride. They laugh at fight of a flower, at 

 the found of a rattle. There is a laugh of joy, of 

 fatisfadion, of compofure. But ridicule differs 



widely 



