Shall glut hell's empty regions."
This threatens to fill hell, even though it was empty; Lord Grizzle, only to fill up the chinks, supposing the rest already full.
[161] Mr. Addison is generally thought to have had this simile in his eye when he wrote that beautiful one at the end of the third act of his Cato.
[162] This beautiful simile is founded on a proverb which does honour to the English language:
"Between two stools the breech falls to the ground."
I am not so well pleased with any written remains of the ancients as with those little aphorisms which verbal tradition hath delivered down to us under the title of proverbs. It were to be wished that, instead of filling their pages with the fabulous theology of the pagans, our modern poets would think it worth their while to enrich their works with the proverbial sayings of their ancestors. Mr. Dryden hath chronicled one in heroic:
"Two ifs scarce make one possibility."—"Conq. of Granada."
My Lord Bacon is of opinion that whatever is known of arts and sciences might be proved to have lurked in the Proverbs of Solomon. I am of the same opinion in relation to those above-mentioned; at least I am confident that a more perfect system of ethics, as well as economy, might be compiled out of them than is at present extant, either in the works of the ancient philosophers, or those more valuable, as more voluminous ones of the modern divines.
[163] Of all the particulars in which the modern stage falls short of the ancients, there is none so much to be lamented as the great scarcity of ghosts. Whence this proceeds I will not presume to determine. Some are of opinion that the moderns are unequal to that sublime language which a ghost ought to speak. One says, ludicrously, that ghosts are out of fashion; another, that they are properer for comedy; forgetting, I suppose, that Aristotle hath told us that a ghost is the soul of tragedy; for so I render the [Greek: psychê ho mythos tês tragôdias], which M. Dacier, amongst others, hath mistaken; I suppose misled by not understanding the Fabula of the Latins, which signifies a ghost as well as fable.
"Te premet nox, fabulæque manes."—Horace.