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the soul; by reason whereof there is agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, Poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical: because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore Poesy feigns them more just in retribution, and more according to revealed providence: because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary, and less interchanged, therefore Poesy endueth them with more rareness, and more unexpected and alternative variations; so as it appeareth, that Pob

esy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind, where. as reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things."

BACON.

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SOME ACCOUNT

OF THE

ORIGIN & NATURE OF MASKS.

As the species of dramatic production called a Mask has been unknown among us for a long time, the reader may not be unwilling, before he enters upon the following pages, to hear a few words respecting it. Not that the author pretends to instruct every one on the subject who may happen to take up his book; but it is possible for persons well acquainted in general with our elder and nobler poetry to have missed this particular branch of it, which as it was chiefly used for ornament on temporary and private occasions, was

at the same time of the most irregular turn and the The Mask, with which

most carelessly cultivated.

poetical readers are most familiar,—Comus,—has less of the particular nature of the composition than any other; and those, which have most of it, either form parts of other dramas, as in the Tempest, and are too short to fix a separate recollection, or happen to be so poor in themselves, like those of Ben Jonson, as to be occasionally omitted in the writer's works.

The Mask, with regard to it's origin, is dismissed by Warton in his History of Poetry as " a branch of the elder drama;" and it's nature is defined by Dr. Johnson to be "a dramatic performance written in a tragic style without attention to rules or probability.” These accounts appear equally vague and incorrect. It is more than doubtful whether the Mask had any connection with the drama in the first instance; and there have been Masks in a comic as well as tragic style. The definition would even include a number of tragedies.

On the other hand, it is not easy to settle the distinct nature of a composition, the lawlessness of which is confessed. Some Masks have been without supernatural agency, others without scenery, others without a machinery of any kind; but an intermixture of songs, and especially some kind of pomp or pageant, seem to have been features in all of them,-in all, at least, that pretend to a dramatic form; for the title, in some instances, appears to have been warranted by the exhibition, real or descriptive, of a piece of dumb shew ; and this, together with the name itself and the mention of the word pageant, may lead us to, it's true origin and definition, the former of which is otherwise lost amidst a multitude of shews, mysteries, and musical dramas.

The Mask then, as far as it's actors and in-door character were concerned, seems to have grown more immediately out of the entertainment called a Masquerade, and as far as it's gorgeousness and machinery, out of the Pageants or Public Shews with which it was customary in the reign of the Tudors to welcome princes

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