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sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station-as if, at his years, and with his experience, any thing was left but to die.

Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how many dramatic personages are there in Shakspeare, which though more tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be shown to our bodily eye. Othello, for instance. Nothing can be more soothing, more flattering to the nobler parts of our natures, than to read of a young Venetian lady of highest extraction, through the force of love, and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying aside every consideration of kindred, and country, and colour, and wedding with a coal black Moor, (for such he is represented, in the imperfect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those days compared with our own, or in compliance with popular notions, though the Moors are now well enough known to be by many shades less worthy of a white woman's fancy,)-it is the perfect triumph of virtue over accidents, of the imagination over the senses. She sees Othello's colour in his mind. But upon the stage, when the imagination is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor, unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello played, whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in his colour; whether he did not find something extremely revolting in the courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and whether the actual sight of the thing did not overweigh all that beautiful compromise which we make in reading;-and the reason it should do so is obvious, because there is just so much reality presented to our senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with not enough of belief in the internal motives-all that which is unseen-to overpower and reconcile the first and obvious prejudices.* What we see upon a stage is body and bodily action; what we are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind, and its movements; and this I think may sufficiently account for the very different sort of delight with which the same play so often affects us in the reading and in the seeing.

It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters in Shakspeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagina

*The error of supposing that because Othello's colour does not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do in the poem. But in the poem we for a while have Paradisaica! senses given us, which vanish when we see a man and his wife without clothes in the picture. The Painters themselves feel this, as is apparent by the awkward shifts they have recourse to, to make them look not quite naked; by a so t of prophetic anachronism, antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So, in the reading of the Play, we see with Desdemona's eyes; in the Becing of it, we are forced to look with our own.

tion, to admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering a change and a diminution-that still stronger the objection must lie against representing another line of characters, which Shakspeare has introduced to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist. When we read the incantations of those terrible beings the Witches in Macbeth, though some of the ingredients of their hellish composition savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other than the most serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound, as Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence? We might as well laugh under a consciousness of the principle of Evil himself being truly and really present with us. But attempt to bring these beings on to a stage, and you turn them instantly into so many old women, that men and children are to laugh at. Contrary to the old saying, that "seeing is believing," the sight actually destroys the faith: and the mirth in which we indulge at their expense, when we see these creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of indemnification which we make to ourselves for the terror which they put us in when reading made them an object of belief -when we surrendered up our reason to the poet, as children to their nurses and their elders; and we laugh at our late 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 well-dressed 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."

Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture which Dryden has thrown into the Tempest: doubtless, without some such vitious 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 Shakspeare at all a subject for stage represen tation? It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we are reading it; but to have a conjurer brought before us in his conjuring gown, 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 effect 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 drawing room-a library opening into a 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 of the Haymarket might as well hope, by his musi cal 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, Hell itself would pass away,

And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day.

The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more impossible to be shown on a stage, than the Enchanted Isle, with its no less interesting and innocent first settlers.

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

*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.

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 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 every thing, to make all things natural. Whereas, the reading of the 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.

Perhaps it would be no bad similitude to liken the pleasure which we take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with that quiet delight which we find in the reading of it, to the different feelings with which a reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine poem. The accursed critical habit-the being called upon to judge and pronounce, must make it quite a different thing to the former. In seeing these plays acted, we are affected just as judges. When Hamlet compares the two pictures of Gertrude's first and second husband, who 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 every thing levels all things; it makes tricks, bows, and courtesies, of importance. Mrs. Siddons never got more fame by any thing 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.

POETRY.

Original. For the Analectic Magazine.

LINES ON THE RIVER SAMPIT

Calm spirit of the murmuring tide,

Through verdant vales that winds its way, To bathe the flowers that deck its side, And cool the burning beams of day;

What though along thy lonely banks
Not oft the tuneful sisters rove,
Nor tripping light in twinkling ranks,
Gay fairies haunt the neighbouring grove :

Though thine is no Etruscan shore,
Where thousand villas stately stand,
Nor hast thou, like swift Hebrus, bore
An Orpheus to the Lesbian strand.

Nor dost thou, number'd with the gods, Like Nile from heav'n derive thy source,

Nor visit Pluto's dark abodes,

Like Arethusa's latent course;

Yet hast thou charms my Muse to fire, And though her voice not long may live,

Her feeble hand shall strike the lyre,

And give what fame her charms can give.

Whilst those old bounds the Thunderer gave, Thy boisterous brothers oft disdain,

And rising fierce with impious wave,

O'erleap the bank, and whelm the plain;

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