Note 196 — ACT V.

“This prologue, for its passionate earnestness, and for the tragic note of preparation which it sounds, might have preceded one of those tales of Thebes, or Pelops’ line, which Milton has so highly commended, as free from the common errors in his days, ‘of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, brought in without discretion corruptly to gratify the people.’ It is as solemn a preparative as the ‘warning voice which he who saw th’ Apocalypse heard cry.’”—Charles Lamb.