Theseus.  Go, one of you, find out the forester,
     For now our observation is perform’d;
     And since we have the vaward of the day,
     My love shall hear the music of my hounds. 
     Uncouple in the western valley, go,
     Dispatch, I say, and find the forester. 
     We will, fair Queen, up to the mountain’s top,
     And mark the musical confusion
     Of hounds and echo in conjunction.

   Hippolita.  I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
     When in a wood of Crete they bay’d the bear
     With hounds of Sparta; never did I hear
     Such gallant chiding.  For besides the groves,
     The skies, the fountains, every region near
     Seena’d all one mutual cry.  I never heard
     So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

   Theseus.  My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
     So flew’d, so sanded, and their heads are hung
     With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
     Crook-knee’d and dew-lap’d, like Thessalian bulls,
     Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells,
     Each under each.  A cry more tuneable
     Was never halloo’d to, nor cheer’d with hom,
     In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly:  Judge when you hear.

Even Titian never made a hunting-piece of a gusto so fresh and lusty, and so near the first ages of the world as this.

It had been suggested to us, that the MIDSUMMER’S night dream would do admirably to get up as a Christmas after-piece; and our prompter proposed that Mr. Kean should play the part of Bottom, as worthy of his great talents.  He might, in the discharge of his duty, offer to play the lady like any of our actresses that he pleased, the lover or the tyrant like any of our actors that he pleased, and the lion like ‘the most fearful wild-fowl living’.  The carpenter, the tailor, and joiner, it was thought, would hit the galleries.  The young ladies in love would interest the side-boxes; and Robin Goodfellow and his companions excite a lively fellow-feeling in the children from school.  There would be two courts, an empire within an empire, the Athenian and the Fairy King and Queen, with their attendants, and with all their finery.  What an opportunity for processions, for the sound of trumpets and glittering of spears!  What a fluttering of urchins’ painted wings; what a delightful profusion of gauze clouds and airy spirits floating on them!

Alas, the experiment has been tried, and has failed; not through the fault of Mr. Kean, who did not play the part of Bottom, nor of Mr. Liston, who did, and who played it well, but from the nature of things.  The Midsummer Night’s Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime.  All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation.  The spectacle was grand; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled.—­Poetry and the stage do not agree well together.  The attempt to reconcile