84. The coward, driven to despair, leaps back into the face of danger; and the tame, stimulated to exertions and aiming at expression, puffs spirit into flutter; or tears the garb of passion and flourishes the rags.
85. Affectation cannot excite sympathy. How can you feel for him who cannot feel for himself? How can he feel for himself, who exhibits the artificial graces of studied attitude?
86. The loathsome is abominable, and no engine of expression.
Coroll. When Spenser dragged into light the entrails of the serpent, slain by the Red-cross Knight, he dreamt a butcher's dream and not a poet's: and Fletcher,[10] or his partner, when rummaging the surgeon's box of cataplasms and trusses to assuage hunger, solicited the grunt of an applauding sty.
87. Sympathy and disgust are the lines that separate terror from horror: though we shudder at, we scarcely pity what we abominate.
Coroll.—Rowe, when he congratulates the ghost on bidding Hamlet spare his mother, accuses her of a crime with which the poet never charged her: that Shakspeare might be hurried on to horror let the "vile jelly" witness, which Cornwall treads from Gloster's bleeding sockets.