- when we surrendered up our reason to the poet, as children to their nurses and their elders; and we laugh at our fears as children, who thought they saw something in the dark, triumph when the bringing in of a candle discovers the vanity of their fears. For this exposure of supernatural agents upon a stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose their own delusiveness. It is the solitary taper and the book that generates a faith in these terrors: a ghost by chandelier light, and in good company, deceives no spectators, -a ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his human dimensions made out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted house, and a welldressed audience, shall arm the most nervous child against any apprehensions: as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles with his impenetrable armour over it, "Bully Dawson would have fought the devil with such advantages."

garden with an alcove in it, a street, or the piazza of Covent-garden, does well enough in a scene; we are content to give as much credit to it as it demands; or rather, we think little about it, it is little more than reading at the top of a page, Scene, a garden; " we do not imagine ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. But to think by the help of painted trees and caverns, which we know to be painted, to transport our minds to Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell;* or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the isle was full: the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind his apparatus, to make us believe that we do indeed hear the crystal spheres, ring out that chime, which if it were to enwrap our fancy long, Milton thinks,

"Time would run back and fetch the age of gold, And speckled Vanity

Would sicken soon and die,

And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould;
Yea, Ilell itself would pass away,

And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day."

Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture which Dryden has thrown into the Tempest: doubtless without some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have sate out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the Tempest of The garden of Eden, with our first parents Shakspeare at all a subject for stage repre- in it, is not more impossible to be shown sentation? It is one thing to read of an on a stage, than the Enchanted Isle, with enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale its no less interesting and innocent first while we are reading it; but to have a settlers. conjuror brought before us in his conjuringgown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself and some hundred of favoured spectators before the curtain are supposed to see, involves such a quantity of the hateful incredible, that all our reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be painted, they can only be believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary cffect to what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A parlour or a drawingroom, a library opening into a garden

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The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the Dresses, which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of garment which he varied, the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity of the public eye, require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish monarch was fairly a counterpart to that which our King wears when he goes to the Parliamenthouse, just so full and cumbersome, and set out with ermine and pearls. And if things must be represented, I see not what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what

It will be said these things are done in pictures. But pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a world of itself, but in scene painting there is the attempt to deceive: and there is the discordancy, never to be got over, between painted scenes and real people.

robe are we conscious of? Some dim images of royalty—a crown and sceptre may float before our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of it? Do we see in our mind's eye what Webb or any other robe-maker could pattern? This is the inevitable consequence of imitating everything, to make all things natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction. It presents to the fancy just so much of external appearances as to make us feel that we are among flesh and blood, while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character. But in acting, scenery, dress, the most contemptible things, call upon us to judge of their

naturalness.

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wants to see the pictures? But in the acting, a miniature must be lugged out; which we know not to be the picture, but only to show how finely a miniature may be represented. This showing of everything levels all things: it makes tricks, bows, and curtseys, of importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than by the manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene in Macbeth: it is as much remembered as any of her thrilling tones or impressive looks. But does such a trifle as this enter into the imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful scene? Does not the mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can? Does it care about the gracefulness of the doing it? But by acting, and judging of acting, all these non-essentials are raised into an importance, injurious to the main interest of the play.

Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure which we take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with I have confined my observations to the that quiet delight which we find in the read- tragic parts of Shakspeare. It would be no ing of it, to the different feelings with which very difficult task to extend the inquiry to a reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer, his comedies; and to show why Falstaff, reads a fine poem. The accursed critical Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest, are habit the being called upon to judge and equally incompatible with stage representapronounce, must make it quite a different tion. The length to which this Essay has thing to the former. In seeing these plays run will make it, I am afraid, sufficiently acted, we are affected just as judges. distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, When Hamlet compares the two pictures of without going any deeper into the subject at Gertrude's first and second husband, who present.

CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,

CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE.

WHEN I selected for publication, in 1808, | unimpassioned deities, passionate mortals Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who-Claius, and Medorus, and Amintas, and lived about the time of Shakspeare, the kind Amaryllis. My leading design was to illusof extracts which I was anxious to give trate what may be called the moral sense of were not so much passages of wit and our ancestors. To show in what manner humour, though the old plays are rich in they felt, when they placed themselves by such, as scenes of passion, sometimes of the the power of imagination in trying circumdeepest quality, interesting situations, seri- stances, in the conflicts of duty and passion, ous descriptions, that which is more nearly or the strife of contending duties; what allied to poetry than to wit, and to tragic sort of loves and enmities theirs were how rather than to comic poetry. The plays their griefs were tempered, and their fullwhich I made choice of were, with few swoln joys abated: how much of Shakspeare exceptions, such as treat of human life and shines in the great men his contemporaries, manners, rather than masques and Arcadian and how far in his divine mind and manners pastorals, with their train of abstractions, he surpassed them and all mankind. I was