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PREFACE.

with any real perception of the sublime and beautiful, this composition will be acknowledged, in spite of its irregularity as a whole, to abound with passages of the most superior excellence, and to exhibit situations the most powerfully interesting that can be figured by the imagination.

On the other hand, to those who are disposed to consider a strict adherence to the unities, as a factitious criterion of dramatic merit, as originating from no basis in nature or in good sense, and as imposing a limitation on the sphere of the drama, by excluding from it the most interesting actions or events, which are incapable of being confined within those rules, this performance will be found to possess a degree of merit that will intitle it to rank in the very first class of dramatical compositions. This Tragedy touches equally those great master-springs of Terror and of Pity. It exhibits a conflict of

the

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