Page:An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777).djvu/21

is calculated to make on the minds of an unprejudiced audience; tho’ there be, I confess, a great deal of something in the composition likely enough to puzzle, and consequently to mislead the Understanding.—The reader will perceive that I distinguish between mental Impressions, and the Understanding.—I wish to avoid every thing that looks like subtlety and refinement; but this is a distinction, which we all comprehend.—There are none of us unconscious of certain feelings or sensations of mind, which do not seem to have passed thro’ the Understanding; the effects, I suppose, of some secret influences from without, acting upon a certain mental sense, and producing feelings and passions in just correspondence to the force and variety of those influences on the one hand, and to the quickness of our sensibility on the other. Be the cause, however, what it may, the fact is undoubtedly so; which is all I am concerned in. And it is equally a fact, which every man’s experience may avouch, that the Understanding and those feelings are frequently