e may proceed to declare their rank and condition, and
the peculiar dangers which environ them, and still there is nothing
better before us than the boarded stage and the talking actor. But, by
and by, the word of passion is uttered, and the heart beats, and the
wooden stage is seen no more, and the actor is forgotten in his griefs
or his anger, and the fictitious position is a real life, and the pomp
and circumstance of the scene, if not believed in, are no longer
questioned. We are not perhaps at Rome, nor is that Mark Antony--for we
never knew Mark Antony to recognise him--but this mimic world has
assumed an independent life and reality of its own. When, indeed, the
passion subsides, and the eloquence of the poet is mute, things revert
to their matter-of-fact condition, the actor is again there, and the
boards of the stage again become visible.

To the passage we last quoted from Dr Johnson, some other objections
suggest themselves; but, as we have not quoted it in a polemical spirit,
but merely to illustrate our own position, we have no wish to enter upon
them. One remark only we will make, and that because it admits of a
general application. Dr Johnson describes the sympathy we feel at the
theatre, as the result of a reference to what our own _personal_
feelings would be in the situation we see represented on the stage. The
auditor represents to himself "what he would himself feel, if he were to
do or suffer what is there feigned to be suffered or to be done. The
reflection that strikes the heart is not, that the evils before us are
real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be
exposed." We do not think that, in order to sympathize with what takes
place on the stage, or in real life, there is any necessity for this
circuitous proceeding. We do not detect in ourselves this constant
reference to our own personality, and, least of all, in those moments
when we are most moved. It is enough that there be a vivid conception of
any passion, for this passion to become for a moment our own. If this
reference to our probable feelings, in such or such a position, were
necessary, how is it that we men sympathize so promptly and so keenly in
the distresses of the heroine? We certainly do not, for instance, set to
work to imagine ourselves women and mothers--which would be a difficult
exercise of the imagination--before we feel the grief of Constance for
the loss of her child. In short, we at once assume to our