ns, who, not possessing the
advantage of reading, are necessarily dependent upon the stage-player
for all the pleasure which they can receive from the drama, and to
whom the very idea of _what an author is_ cannot be made
comprehensible without some pain and perplexity of mind: the error is
one from which persons otherwise not meanly lettered, find it almost
impossible to extricate themselves.

[Footnote 1: It is observable that we fall into this confusion only
in dramatic recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who reads
Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a great poet
and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davis, 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 those 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 cramped 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 Shakspeare which have escaped
being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the
same writer which have happily been left out in the 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's Speaker_, 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 abo