a sense of their presence?  We might as well laugh under a consciousness of the principle of Evil himself being truly and really present with us.  But attempt to bring these things on to a stage, and you turn them instantly into so many old women, that men and children are to laugh at.  Contrary to the old saying, that “seeing is believing,” the sight actually destroys the faith; and the mirth in which we indulge at their expense, when we see these creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of indemnification which we make to ourselves for the terror which they put us in when reading made them an object of belief,—­when we surrendered up our reason to the poet, as children to their nurses and their elders; and we laugh at our fears, as children, who thought they saw something in the dark, triumph when the bringing in of a candle discovers the vanity of their fears.  For this exposure of supernatural agents upon a stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose their own delusiveness.  It is the solitary taper and the book that generates a faith in these terrors:  a ghost by chandelier light, and in good company, deceives no spectators,—­a ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his human dimensions made out at leisure.  The sight of a well-lighted house, and a well-dressed audience, shall arm the most nervous child against any apprehensions:  as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles with his impenetrable armor over it, “Bully Dawson would have fought the devil with such advantages.”

Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture which Dryden has thrown into the Tempest:  doubtless, without some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have sat out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda.  But is the tempest of Shakspeare at all a subject for stage-representation?  It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we are reading it; but to have a conjurer brought before us in his conjuring gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself and some hundred of favored spectators before the curtain are supposed to see, involves such a quantity of the hateful incredible, that all our reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient.  Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be painted,—­they can only be believed.  But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended.  That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid.  A parlor or a drawing-room,—­a library opening into a garden—­a garden with an alcove in it,—­a street, or the