I saw these plays in the season 1781-2, when I was from six to seven years old.  After the intervention of six or seven other years (for at school all play-going was inhibited) I again entered the doors of a theatre.  That old Artaxerxes evening had never done ringing in my fancy.  I expected the same feelings to come again with the same occasion.  But we differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from six.  In that interval what had I not lost!  At the first period I knew nothing, understood nothing, discriminated nothing.  I felt all, loved all, wondered all—­

  Was nourished, I could not tell how—­

I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist.  The same things were there materially; but the emblem, the reference, was gone!—­The green curtain was no longer a veil, drawn between two worlds, the unfolding of which was to bring back past ages, to present “a royal ghost,”—­but a certain quantity of green baize, which was to separate the audience for a given time from certain of their fellow-men who were to come forward and pretend those parts.  The lights—­the orchestra lights—­came up a clumsy machinery.  The first ring, and the second ring, was now but a trick of the prompter’s bell—­which had been, like the note of the cuckoo, a phantom of a voice, no hand seen or guessed at which ministered to its warning.  The actors were men and women painted.  I thought the fault was in them; but it was in myself, and the alteration which those many centuries—­of six short twelve-months—­had wrought in me.—­Perhaps it was fortunate for me that the play of the evening was but an indifferent comedy, as it gave me time to crop some unreasonable expectations, which might have interfered with the genuine emotions with which I was soon after enabled to enter upon the first appearance to me of Mrs. Siddons in Isabella.  Comparison and retrospection soon yielded to the present attraction of the scene; and the theatre became to me, upon a new stock, the most delightful of recreations.

DREAM-CHILDREN

A REVERIE

Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when they were children; to stretch their imagination to the conception of a traditionary great-uncle, or grandame, whom they never saw.  It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about me the other evening to hear about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great house in Norfolk (a hundred times bigger than that in which they and papa lived) which had been the scene—­so at least it was generally believed in that part of the country—­of the tragic incidents which they had lately become familiar with from the ballad of the Children in the Wood.  Certain it is that the whole story of the children and their cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney-piece of the great hall, the whole story down to the Robin Redbreasts,