A plot forcibly confined within twenty-four hours is as absurd as one confined within a peristyle.

Every plot has its proper duration as well as its appropriate place.

Think of administering the same dose of time to all events! of applying the same measure to everything! You would laugh at a cobbler who should attempt to put the same shoe on every foot.

To cross unity of time and unity of place like the bars of a cage, and pedantically to introduce therein, in the name of Aristotle, all the deeds, all the nations, all the figures which Providence sets before us in such vast numbers in real life,--to proceed thus is to mutilate men and things, to cause history to make wry faces.

Let us say, rather, that everything will die in the operation, and so the dogmatic mutilators reach their ordinary result: what was alive in the chronicles is dead in tragedy.