For when we stumble, we should not, like children, make an uproar; we should take the measures which reason prescribes, not raising a lament, but finding a cure.

And the better part of us is ready to follow reason, while the irrational principle is full of sorrow and distraction at the recollection of our troubles.

Unfortunately, however, this latter furnishes the chief materials of the imitative arts.

Whereas reason is ever in repose and cannot easily be displayed, especially to a mixed multitude who have no experience of her.

Thus the poet is like the painter in two ways: first he paints an inferior degree of truth, and secondly, he is concerned with an inferior part of the soul.