have been but to fall back
on nature. Why, only couple of years ago, half a million of our countrymen
and countrywomen of all ages, flocked by instalments, in a single season,
to look at our First Parents fresh from the hands of a French painter,
naked as you were born. Such is the power of Names. No imagination--not
the least in the world--had that painter; no sense--not the least in the
world--of the beautiful or of the sublime in the human figure. But the
population, urban and rural alike, were unhappy till they had had a sight
of Adam and Eve in Paradise. We cheerfully acknowledge that Adam was a
very good-looking young fellow--bang up to the mark, six feet without his
shoes-close upon thirteen stone. Had he been advertised as Major Adam of
the Scots Greys, the brevet would have exhibited himself on that bank to
empty benches. In like manner, with the fairest of her daughters, Eve. As
Pope says,

"Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see,
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be."

Pious old gentlemen, however, pronounced her perfect, merely because they
gazed on the image of the mother of mankind. Painted they both were in
oils. But from what we saw--for we too were carried away by the general
enthusiasm--we are justified in inferring that, under prudent management,
our First Parents might be successfully got up alive during the summer
season at our Adelphi.

We believe that "The State of Innocence" _was_ written for the stage. But
the playwright did not intend that Adam and Eve should be stark-naked in
an acted opera. Strange to say, there is not a word in it about their
naked majesty or innocence. Dryden, by his idea of an opera, was forced to
depart from nature and Milton. Eve's dream, so characteristically narrated
by her to Adam in the poem, is shadowed out by a vision passing before her
asleep, in the opera. The stage direction gives:--"A vision, where a tree
rises loaden with fruit; spirits rise with it, and draw a canopy out of
the tree; and the spirits dance about the tree in deformed shapes; after
the dance an angel enters, _with a woman_, HABITED LIKE EVE." That is
decisive.

But what of the opera? In the preface, Dryden says "I cannot, without
injury to the deceased author of 'Paradise Lost,' but acknowledge, that
the poem has received _its entire foundation, part of the design, and many
of the ornaments from him_. What I have borrowed will be so easily
discerned from my mean productions