I pity him, but must not dare to show it:
It adds to some men's miscry not to know it.

Richard Brome.

A common pity does not love express;
Pity is love when grown into excess.

Sir R. Howard's Vestal Virgin.

Her very judges wrung their hands for pity; Their old hearts melted in them as she spoke, And tears ran down upon their silver beards. Rowe's Lady Jane Grey. Those moving tears will quite dissolve my frame: They melt that soul which threats could never shake.

Higgons's Generous Conqueror. The brave are ever tender,

And feel the miseries of suffering virtue.
Martyn's Timoleon.

I find a pity hangs upon his breasts,
Like gentle dew, that cools all cruel passions.
Howard's Duke of Lerma.
The generous heart

Should scorn a pleasure which gives others pain.
Thomson's Sophonisba.

A generous warmth opens the hero's soul,
And soft compassion flows where courage dwells.
C. Johnson's Medea.
Why clingest thou to my raiment ?
Thy grasp of grief is stronger on my heart-
For sterner oft our words than feelings are.
Maturin's Bertram.

The truly brave are soft of heart and eyes,
And feel for what their duty bids them do.
Byron's Doge of Venice.

Pity! is it pity to recall to feeling
The wretch too happy to escape to death
By the compassionate trance, poor nature's last
Resource against the tyranny of pain?

PLAYERS.

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit,
That, from her working, all his visage warm'd:
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing?
For Hecuba?

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? and all for nothing?
Shaks. Hamlet.

Players

Were never more uncertain in their lives;
They know not when to play, where to play, nor
What to play; not when to play, for fearful fools;
Where to play, for puritan fools; nor what
To play, for critical fools.

Middleton's Mad World my Masters.
They abuse our scene,.
And say we live by vice; indeed 't is true;
As the physicians by diseases do,
Only to cure them: they do live, we see,
Like cooks by pampering prodigality;
Which are our fond accusers. On the stage,
We set an usurer to tell his age;
How ugly looks his soul: a prodigal
Is taught by us how far from liberal
His folly bears him. Boldly I dare say,
There has been more by us in some one play
Laugh'd into wit, and virtue, than hath been
By twenty tedious lectures drawn from sin,
And foppish humours: hence the cause doth rise,
Men are not won by th' ears, so well as eyes.
Randolph's Muse's Looking Glass.

PLEASURE.

How happy art thou man, when thou 'rt no more
Thyself! when all the pangs that grind thy soul,
In rapture, and sweet oblivion lost,
Yield a short interval, and ease from pain.
Somerville's Chase.

Pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow-falls in the river,

A moment white-then melts for ever;
Or like the borealis race,

'That flits ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow's lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm-
Nae man can tether time or tide.

Burns.

POETS.

Heaps of huge words uphoarded hideously,
With horrid sound, though having little sense,
They think to be chief praise of poetry,
And thereby wanting true intelligence,
Have marr'd the face of goodly poesie,
And made a monster of their fantasie.

Spenser's Tears of the Muses.

They to the vulgar sort now pipe and sing,
And make them merry with their fooleries;

They cheerly chant, and rhymes at random fling,
The fruitful spawn of their rank fantasies:
They feed the ears of fools with flattery,
And good men blame, and losels magnify.
Spenser's Tears of the Muses.

How shall my debts be paid? or can my scores
Be clear'd with verses to my creditors?
Hexameter 's no sterling; and I fear

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

Shaks. Midsummer Night's Dream.

I had rather be a kitten, and cry- -mew,
Than one of these same metre-ballad-mongers:
I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn'd,

Or a dry wheel grate on an axle-tree;

And that would set my teeth nothing on edge,
Nothing so much as mincing poetry.

Shaks. Henry IV. Part I.
Worthiest poets

Shun common and plebeian forms of speech,
Every illiberal and affected phrase,

A poet's then exact in every part
That is born one by nature, nurst by art:
Whose happy mixture both of skill and fate,
Makes the most sudden thought elaborate:
Whose easy strains a flowing sense does fit;
Unforc'd expressions, and unravish'd wit:
Words fill'd with equal subject, such as brings,
To chosen language, high and chosen things.
Harsh reason clear as day, as smooth as sleep,
Glide here like rivers, even still though deep:
Discords grow music; grief itself delight;
Horror, when he describes, leaves off t' affright.
Sullen philosophy does learn to go

In lightest dressings, and becomes them too.

Dr. Lluellin.

A poem's life and death dependeth still Not on the poet's wits, but reader's will.

Matter and form with art and decency.

Chapman.

Poets may boast, as safely vain,
Their works shall with the world remain;
Both bound together live or die,
The verses and the prophecy.

Waller on English Verse.

Poets that lasting marble seek,
Must carve in Latin or in Greek:
We write in sand, our language grows,
And like the tide, our work o'erflows.

Waller on English Verse.

The poets may of inspiration boast,
Their rage, ill governed, in the clouds is lost,
He that proportioned wonders can disclose,
At once his fancy and his judgment shows;
Chaste moral writing we may learn from hence,
Neglect of which no wit can recompense.
The fountain which from Helicon proceeds,
That sacred stream should never water weeds,
Nor make the cup of thorns and thistles grow,
Which envy or perverted nature sow.

I thence

With equal eagerness contend
Some to cry down, and others to commend:
So easy 'tis to judge, so hard to do;
There's so much frailty, yet such prying too;
That who their poetry to view expose,
Must be prepar'd to be abus'd in prose.
A. Brome and R. Brome.

Weller.

Milton's Paradise Lost

But those that write in rhyme, still make
The one verse for the other's sake;
For, one for sense, and one for rhyme,
I think 's sufficient at one time.

Butler's Hudibras.