ual activity, which prompts them to overleap
these moral fences. Barnwell is a wretched murderer; there is a
certain fitness between his neck and the rope; he is the legitimate
heir to the gallows; nobody who thinks at all can think of any
alleviating circumstances in his case to make him a fit object of
mercy. Or to take an instance from the higher tragedy, what else but
a mere assassin is Glenalvon? Do we think of anything but of the
crime which he commits, and the rack which he deserves? That is all
which we really think about him. Whereas in corresponding characters
in Shakspeare, so little do the actions comparatively affect us, that
while the impulses, the inner mind in all its perverted greatness,
solely seems real and is exclusively attended to, the crime is
comparatively nothing. But when we see these things represented, the
acts which they do are comparatively everything, their impulses
nothing. The state of sublime emotion into which we are elevated by
those images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that
solemn prelude with which he entertains the time till the bell shall
strike which is to call him to murder Duncan,--when we no longer read
it in a book, when we have given up that vantage ground of
abstraction which reading possesses over seeing, and come to see a
man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit
a murder, if the acting be true and impressive, as I have witnessed
it in Mr. K.'s performance of that part, the painful anxiety about
the act, the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems
unperpetrated, the too close pressing semblance of reality, give a
pain and an uneasiness which totally destroy all the delight which
the words in the book convey, where the deed doing never presses upon
us with the painful sense of presence; it rather seems to belong to
history,--to something past and inevitable, if it has anything to do
with time at all. The sublime images, the poetry alone, is that which
is present to our minds in the reading.

So to see Lear acted,--to see an old man tottering about the stage
with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy
night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want
to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling
which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of
Shakspeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they
mimic the storm which he goe