Abdel. I'll hate you, and this visit is my last.

Lynd. Do, if you can: you know I hold you fast."

That these passages violate all historical propriety, that
sentiments to which nothing similar was ever even affected except
by the cavaliers of Europe, are transferred to Mexico and Agra,
is a light accusation. We have no objection to a conventional
world, an Illyrian puritan, or a Bohemian seaport. While the
faces are good, we care little about the back-ground. Sir Joshua
Reynolds says that the curtains and hangings in an historical
painting ought to be, not velvet or cotton, but merely drapery.
The same principle should be applied to poetry and romance. The
truth of character is the first object; the truth of place and
time is to be considered only in the second place. Puff himself
could tell the actor to turn out his toes, and remind him that
Keeper Hatton was a great dancer. We wish that, in our own time,
a writer of a very different order from Puff had not too often
forgotten human nature in the niceties of upholstery, millinery,
and cookery.

We blame Dryden, not because the persons of his dramas are not
Moors or Americans, but because they are not men and women;--not
because love, such as he represents it, could not exist in a
harem or in a wigwam, but because it could not exist anywhere.
As is the love of his heroes, such are all their other emotions.
All their qualities, their courage, their generosity, their
pride, are on the same colossal scale. Justice and prudence are
virtues which can exist only in a moderate degree, and which