Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be revolting, or rather in real life could not have co-existed with the warm-hearted temperament of the character.  But when you read it in the spirit with which such playful selections and specious combinations rather than strict metaphrases of nature should be taken, or when you saw Bannister play it, it neither did, nor does wound the moral sense at all.  For what is Ben—­the pleasant sailor which Bannister gave us—­but a piece of a satire—­a creation of Congreve’s fancy—­a dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor’s character—­his contempt of money—­his credulity to women—­with that necessary estrangement from home which it is just within the verge of credibility to suppose might produce such an hallucination as is here described.  We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his character.  But when an actor comes, and instead of the delightful phantom—­the creature dear to half-belief—­which Bannister exhibited—­displays before our eyes a downright concretion of a Wapping sailor—­a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar—­and nothing else—­when instead of investing it with a delicious confusedness of the head, and a veering undirected goodness of purpose—­he gives to it a downright daylight understanding, and a full consciousness of its actions; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the character with a pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by them alone—­we feel the discord of the thing; the scene is disturbed; a real man has got in among the dramatis personae, and puts them out.  We want the sailor turned out.  We feel that his true place is not behind the curtain, but in the first or second gallery.

(To be resumed occasionally.)

ELIA.

[Footnote 1: 
  How lovelily the Adriatic whore
  Dress’d in her flames will shine—­devouring flames—­
  Such as will burn her to her wat’ry bottom,
  And hiss in her foundation.

  Pierre, in Venice Preserved.]

[Footnote 2:  Viola.  She took the ring from me; I’ll none of it.

Mal.  Come, Sir, you peevishly threw it to her; and her will is, it should be so returned.  If it be worth stooping for, there it lies in your eye; if not, be it his that finds it.]

[Footnote 3:  Mrs. Inchbald seems to have fallen into the common mistake of the character in some sensible observations, otherwise, upon this Comedy.  “It might be asked,” she says, “whether this credulous steward was much deceived in imputing a degraded taste, in the sentiments of love, to his fair lady Olivia, as she actually did fall in love with a domestic; and one, who from his extreme youth, was perhaps a greater reproach to her discretion, than had she cast a tender regard upon her old and faithful servant.”  But where does she gather the fact of his age?  Neither Maria nor Fabian ever cast that reproach upon him.]