thing, but expressing the reality of it, and, as arbitrary language is
an heir-loom of the human race, being itself a part of that which it
manifests. What shall I deduce from the preceding positions? Even
this,--the appropriate, the never to be too much valued advantage of the
theatre, if only the actors were what we know they have been,--a
delightful, yet most effectual, remedy for this dead palsy of the public
mind. What would appear mad or ludicrous in a book, when presented to
the senses under the form of reality, and with the truth of nature,
supplies a species of actual experience. This is indeed the special
privilege of a great actor over a great poet. No part was ever played in
perfection, but nature justified herself in the hearts of all her
children, in what state soever they were, short of absolute moral
exhaustion, or downright stupidity. There is no time given to ask
questions or to pass judgments; we are taken by storm, and, though in
the histrionic art many a clumsy counterfeit, by caricature of one or
two features, may gain applause as a fine likeness, yet never was the
very thing rejected as a counterfeit. O! when I think of the
inexhaustible mine of virgin treasure in our Shakspeare, that I have
been almost daily reading him since I was ten years old,--that the
thirty intervening years have been unintermittingly and not fruitlessly
employed in the study of the Greek, Latin, English, Italian, Spanish and
German 'belle lettrists', and the last fifteen years in addition, far
more intensely in the analysis of the laws of life and reason as they
exist in man,--and that upon every step I have made forward in taste, in
acquisition of facts from history or my own observation, and in
knowledge of the different laws of being and their apparent exceptions,
from accidental collision of disturbing forces,--that at every new
accession of information, after every successful exercise of meditation,
and every fresh presentation of experience, I have unfailingly
discovered a proportionate increase of wisdom and intuition in