the spirit of education stalks abroad and influences men directly
and indirectly, by private generosity and national foresight, to
accumulate as religiously as in former ages ecclesiastics and devotees
gathered sacred relics, all that helps to give the people a full
understanding of lives and times and countries other than their own.
Can it be that in such an age all that can help to aid the inspiration
and to increase direct knowledge is of no account whatever, because,
forsooth, it has a medium or method of its own? There are those who
say that Shakespeare is better in the closet than on the stage; that
dramatic beauty is more convincing when read in private than when
spoken on the stage to the accompaniment of suitable action. And yet,
if this be so, it is a strange thing that, with all the activity of
the new-born printing-press, Shakespeare's works were not known to the
reading public till the fame of the writer had been made on the stage.
And it is a stranger thing still, if the drama be a mere poetic form
of words, that the writer who began with _Venus and Adonis_, when he
found the true method of expression to suit his genius, ended with
_Hamlet_ and _The Tempest_.

How is it, I ask, if these responsible makers of statements be
correct, that every great writer down from the days of Elizabeth, when
the drama took practical shape from the wish of the poets to render
human life in all its phases, have been desirous of seeing their
works, when written in dramatic form, represented on the stage--and
not only represented, but represented under the most favorable
conditions obtainable, both as to the fitness of setting and the
choice of the most skilled and excellent players? Are we to take it
that the poet, with his eye in a fine phrenzy rolling, sees all the
minute details of form, color, light, sound, and action which have
to be rendered complete on the stage? Is there nothing in what the