 “Of Tragedy” grapples with a very different set of problems than “Of the Standard of Taste.” The motivating issue in “Of Tragedy” is that of unpleasant emotion as a positive feature of a work. Hume proposes to explain how “a well-written tragedy” is pleasing when that pleasure appears to depend on “sorrow, terror, anxiety,” and other naturally disagreeable emotions (OT, 258). Hume had visited this topic before, in the Treatise, where his account of the pleasure of tragedy invokes pity and sympathy (T, 369). “Of Tragedy” replaces this earlier account with a complex proposal about the mental workings of imagination in relation to our negative passions.