and tears to terrestrial globes, coyness to an enthymeme, absence
to a pair of compasses, and an unrequited passion to the fortieth
remainder-man in an entail, Juliet leaning from the balcony, and
Miranda smiling over the chess-board, sent home many spectators,
as kind and simple-hearted as the master and mistress of
Fletcher's Ralpho, to cry themselves to sleep.

No species of fiction is so delightful to us as the old English
drama. Even its inferior productions possess a charm not to be
found in any other kind of poetry. It is the most lucid mirror
that ever was held up to nature. The creations of the great
dramatists of Athens produce the effect of magnificent
sculptures, conceived by a mighty imagination, polished with the
utmost delicacy, embodying ideas of ineffable majesty and beauty,
but cold, pale, and rigid, with no bloom on the cheek, and no
speculation in the eye. In all the draperies, the figures, and
the faces, in the lovers and the tyrants, the Bacchanals and the
Furies, there is the same marble chillness and deadness. Most of
the characters of the French stage resemble the waxen gentlemen
and ladies in the window of a perfumer, rouged, curled, and
bedizened, but fixed in such stiff attitudes, and staring with
eyes expressive of such utter unmeaningness, that they cannot
produce an illusion for a single moment. In the English plays
alone is to be found the warmth, the mellowness, and the reality
of painting. We know the minds of men and women, as we know the
faces of the men and women of Vandyke.

The excellence of these works is in a great measure the result of
two peculiarities, which the critics of the French school
consider as defects,--from the mixture of tragedy and comedy, and