them in this instance fails not only of effect, but of decorum.  The ideal can have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective; everything there is in the foreground.  That which was merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality.  Where all is left to the imagination (as is the case in reading) every circumstance, near or remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and tells according to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested.  But the imagination cannot sufficiently qualify the actual impressions of the senses.  Any offence given to the eye is not to be got rid of by explanation.  Thus Bottom’s head in the play is a fantastic illusion, produced by magic spells:  on the stage, it is an ass’s head, and nothing more; certainly a very strange costume for a gentleman to appear in.  Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine.  Fairies are not incredible, but fairies six feet high are so.  Monsters are not shocking, if they are seen at a proper distance.  When ghosts appear at midday, when apparitions stalk along Cheapside, then may the MIDSUMMER’S night dream be represented without injury at Covent Garden or at Drury Lane.  The boards of a theatre and the regions of fancy are not the same thing.

ROMEO AND JULIET

Romeo and Juliet is the only tragedy which Shakespeare has written entirely on a love-story.  It is supposed to have been his first play, and it deserves to stand in that proud rank.  There is the buoyant spirit of youth in every line, in the rapturous intoxication of hope, and in the bitterness of despair.  It has been said of Romeo and Juliet by a great critic, that ’whatever is most intoxicating in the odour of a southern spring, languishing in the song of the nightingale, or voluptuous in the first opening of the rose, is to be found in this poem’.  The description is true; and yet it does not answer to our idea of the play.  For if it has the sweetness of the rose, it has its freshness too; if it has the languor of the nightingale’s song, it has also its giddy transport; if it has the softness of a southern spring, it is as glowing and as bright.  There is nothing of a sickly and sentimental cast.  Romeo and Juliet are in love, but they are not love-sick.  Everything speaks the very soul of pleasure, the high and healthy pulse of the passions:  the heart beats, the blood circulates and mantles throughout.  Their courtship is not an insipid interchange of sentiments lip-deep, learnt at second-hand from poems and plays,—­made up of beauties of the most shadowy kind, of ‘fancies wan that hang the pensive head’, of evanescent smiles and sighs that breathe not, of delicacy that shrinks from the touch and feebleness that scarce supports itself, an elaborate vacuity of thought, and an artificial dearth of sense, spirit, truth, and nature!—­It is the reverse of all this.  It is Shakespeare all over, and Shakespeare when he was young.