The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice.  To see a coward done to the life upon a stage would produce anything but mirth.  Yet we most of us remember Jack Bannister’s cowards.  Could any thing be more agreeable, more pleasant?  We loved the rogues.  How was this effected but by the exquisite art of the actor in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us, the spectators, even in the extremity of the shaking fit, that he was not half such a coward as we took him for?  We saw all the common symptoms of the malady upon him; the quivering lip, the cowering knees, the teeth chattering; and could have sworn “that man was frightened.”  But we forgot all the while—­or kept it almost a secret to ourselves—­that he never once lost his self-possession; that he let out by a thousand droll looks and gestures—­meant at us, and not at all supposed to be visible to his fellows in the scene, that his confidence in his own resources had never once deserted him.  Was this a genuine picture of a coward? or not rather a likeness, which the clever artist contrived to palm upon us instead of an original; while we secretly connived at the delusion for the purpose of greater pleasure, than a more genuine counterfeiting of the imbecility, helplessness, and utter self-desertion, which we know to be concomitants of cowardice in real life, could have given us?

Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endurable on the stage, but because the skilful actor, by a sort of sub-reference, rather than direct appeal to us, disarms the character of a great deal of its odiousness, by seeming to engage our compassion for the insecure tenure by which he holds his money bags and parchments?  By this subtle vent half of the hatefulness of the character—­the self-closeness with which in real life it coils itself up from the sympathies of men—­evaporates.  The miser becomes sympathetic; i.e. is no genuine miser.  Here again a diverting likeness is substituted for a very disagreeable reality.

Spleen, irritability—­the pitiable infirmities of old men, which produce only pain to behold in the realities, counterfeited upon a stage, divert not altogether for the comic appendages to them, but in part from an inner conviction that they are being acted before us; that a likeness only is going on, and not the thing itself.  They please by being done under the life, or beside it; not to the life.  When Gatty acts an old man, is he angry indeed? or only a pleasant counterfeit, just enough of a likeness to recognise, without pressing upon us the uneasy sense of reality?