Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure which we take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with that quiet delight which we find in the reading of it, to the different feelings with which a reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine poem.  The accursed critical habit—­the being called upon to judge and pronounce, must make it quite a different thing to the former.  In seeing these plays acted, we are affected just as judges.  When Hamlet compares the two pictures of Gertrude’s first and second husband, who wants to see the pictures?  But in the acting, a miniature must be lugged out; which we know not to be the picture, but only to show how finely a miniature may be represented.  This showing of everything levels all things:  it makes tricks, bows, and curtseys, of importance.  Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than by the manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene in Macbeth:  it is as much remembered as any of her thrilling tones or impressive looks.  But does such a trifle as this enter into the imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful scene?  Does not the mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can?  Does it care about the gracefulness of the doing it?  But by acting, and judging of acting, all these non-essentials are raised into an importance, injurious to the main interest of the play.

I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakspeare.  It would be no very difficult task to extend the inquiry to his comedies; and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest, are equally incompatible with stage-representation.  The length to which this Essay has run will make it, I am afraid, sufficiently distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without going any deeper into the subject at present.

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CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEAKE.

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When I selected for publication, in 1808, “Specimens of English Dramatic Poets” who lived about the time of Shakspeare, the kind of extracts which I was anxious to give were not so much passages of wit and humor, though the old plays are rich in such, as scenes of passion, sometimes of the deepest quality, interesting situations, serious descriptions, that which is more nearly allied to poetry than to wit, and to tragic rather than to comic poetry.  The plays which I made choice of were, with few exceptions, such as treat of human life and manners, rather than masques and Arcadian pastorals, with their train of abstractions, unimpassioned deities, passionate mortals—­Claius, and Medorus, and Amintas, and Amaryllis.  My leading design was to illustrate what may be called the moral sense of our ancestors.  To show in what manner they felt when they placed themselves by the power of imagination in trying circumstances, in the conflicts