human
To attempt to understand poetry without having diligently digested this treatise, would be as absurd and impossible as to pretend to a skill in geometry without having studied Euclid. The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth chapters, wherein he has pointed out the properest methods of exciting terror and pity, convince us that he was intimately acquainted with those objects which most forcibly affect the heart. The prime excellence of this precious treatise is the scholastic precision and philosophical clearness with which the subject is handled, without any address to {607} the passions or imagination. It is to be lamented that the part of the Poeticks in which he has given precepts for comedy did not likewise descend to posterity.
gpt
He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises. The best works of the greatest merit for the public have proceeded from unmarried and childless men.