who
reads Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a
great poet and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davies,
the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the _Paradise
Lost_ better than any man in England in his day (though I
cannot help thinking there must be some mistake in this
tradition), was therefore, by his intimate friends, set upon
a level with Milton.

Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of
satisfaction which I received some years back from seeing for the
first time a tragedy of Shakespeare performed, in which these two
great performers sustained the principal parts. It seemed to embody
and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape.
But dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure,
this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our
cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and
brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have
let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.

How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions
thus crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing
actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness
with which we turn to those plays of Shakespeare which have escaped
being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the same
writer which have happily been left out in performance. How far the
very custom of hearing anything _spouted_, withers and blows upon a
fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from _Henry the Fifth_,
&c. which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to
be found in _Enfield Speakers_, and such kind of books. I confess
myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in
_Hamlet_, beginning 'To be or not to be', or to tell whether it be
good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by
declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place
and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a
perfect dead member.

It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the
plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage,
than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished
excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in
them, which comes not under the province of acting, with w