the end of expectation.

To the unities of time and place he has shewn no regard, and perhaps
a nearer view of the principles on which they stand will diminish
their value, and withdraw from them the veneration which, from the
time of Corneille, they have very generally received by discovering
that they have given more trouble to the poet, than pleasure to
the auditor.

The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from
the supposed necessity of making the drama credible. The criticks
hold it impossible, that an action of months or years can be possibly
believed to pass in three hours; or that the spectator can suppose
himself to sit in the theatre, while ambassadors go and return
between distant kings, while armies are levied and towns besieged,
while an exile wanders and returns, or till he whom they saw courting
his mistress, shall lament the untimely fall of his son. The mind
revolts from evident falsehood, and fiction loses its force when
it departs from the resemblance of reality.

From the narrow limitation of time necessarily arises the contraction
of place. The spectator, who knows that he saw the first act
at Alexandria, cannot suppose that he sees the next at Rome, at
a distance to which not the dragons of Medea could, in so short
a time, have transported him; he knows with certainty that he has
not changed his place; and he knows that place cannot change itself;
that what was a house cannot become a plain; that what was Thebes
can never be Persepolis.

Such is the triumphant language with which a critick exults over the