Queller of Satan! on thy glorious work Thus they the Son of God, our Saviour meek, Sung victor, and from heavenly feast refresh'd Brought on his way with joy; he unobserved Home to his mother's house private return'd. SAMSON AGONISTES. A DRAMATIC POEM. Τραγῳδια μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας.--κ.τ.λ. TRAGEDIA EST IMITATIO ACTIONIS SERIE, ETC. PER MISERICORDIAM ET METUM PERFICIENS TALIUM AFFECTUUM LUSTRATIONEM. Aristot. Poet, cap. 6. OF THAT SORT OF DRAMATIC POEM WHICH IS CALLED TRAGEDY. TRAGEDY, as it was anciently composed, hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems: therefore said by Aristotle to be of power, by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated. Nor is nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion: for so in physic, things of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt-humors. Hence philosophers, and other gravest writers, as Cicero, Plutarch, and others, frequently cite out of tragic poets, both to adorn and illustrate their discourse. The apostle Paul himself thought it not unworthy to insert a verse of Euripides into the text of Holy Scripture (1 Cor. xv. 33); and Paræus, commenting on the Revelation, divides the whole book as a tragedy, into acts distinguished each by a chorus of heavenly harpings and song between. Heretofore, men in highest dignity have labored not a little to be thought able to compose a tragedy. Of that honor Dionysius the elder was no less ambitious, than before of his attaining to the tyranny. Augustus Cæsar also had begun his Ajax; but unable to please his own judgment with what he had begun, left it unfinishd. Seneca the philosopher is by some thought the author of those tragedies (at least the best of them) that go under that name. Gregory Nazianzen, a father of the Church, thought it not unbeseeming the sanctity of his person to write a tragedy, which is entitled Christ Suffering. This is mentioned to vindicate tragedy from the small esteem, or rather infamy, which in the account of many it undergoes at this day with other common interludes; happening through the poet's error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons, which by all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people. And though ancient tragedy use no prologue, yet using sometimes, in case of |