words. The music ceasing, and the heavens being closed,
the scene shifts, and, on a sudden, represents hell. Part of the scene is
a lake of brimstone or rolling fire; the earth of a burnt colour. The
fallen angels appear on the lake, lying prostrate; a tune of horror and
lamentation is heard."

How all this might take with a mixed audience, we do not presume to
conjecture, yet very great absurdities do sometimes take almost as well on
as of the stage. Must "the _costume_ of our first parents, had there been
no other objection, have excluded the 'State of Innocence' from the
stage?" True, Sir Charles Sedley, and other "men of wit and fashion about
town," were not well received when exhibiting themselves naked on a
balcony overhanging a great thoroughfare; but then they were drunk, and
acted not only indecent but insulting, nay, threatening attitudes,
accompanied with abjurgations and blasphemies, which was going
injudiciously in advance of that age of refinement. Suppose Booth
perfectly sober in Adam, and Nell Gwynne up merely to the proper pitch of
vivacity in Eve, we do not see why the opera might not have had a run
during the reign of the Merry Monarch. The first sight we have of Adam is,
"as newly created, laid on a bed of moss and flowers, by a rock." He rises
as he begins to utter his earliest soliloquy; and we believe it is an
established rule, not to turn your back on--or in playhouse phrase--not to
rump your audience. In such a case; however, considerable latitude would
have been conceded by both sexes to our original; and what with shades and
shrubs, and, above all, the rock, an adroit actor could have had little
difficulty in accommodating to his posterity their progenitor. Of Eve our
first glimpse is among "trees cut out on each side, with several fruits
upon them; a fountain in the midst; at the far end the prospect
terminating in walks." Nelly might have worn her famous felt chapeau,
broad as a coach-wheel, as appropriately in that as in any other
character, and contrived to amble about with sufficient decorum for those
fastidious times. Besides, as custom soon reconciles people to the most
absurd dress, so would it probably, before long, reconcile them to no
dress at all. A full-bottomed wig in the mimic scene, on heroic
representative of a class of men, who, off the boards, had always worn,
not only their own hair, but a crop, was _a sine qua non_ condition of
historic success. _In puris naturalibus_ would