es feel this, as is apparent by the awkward shifts
they have recourse to, to make them look not quite naked; by a sort
of prophetic anachronism, antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So
in the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes: in the
seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own.]

It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters
in Shakspeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet
something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination,
to admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering
a change and a diminution,--that still stronger the objection must
lie against representing another line of characters, which Shakspeare
has introduced to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his
scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to
common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to
consist. When we read the incantations of those terrible beings the
Witches in Macbeth, though some of the ingredients of their hellish
composition savor of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other
than the most serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not
feel spellbound as Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of
their presence? We might as well laugh under a consciousness of the
principle of Evil himself being truly and really present with us. But
attempt to bring these things on to a stage, and you turn them
instantly into so many old women, that men and children are to laugh
at. Contrary to the old saying, that "seeing is believing," the sight
actually destroys the faith; and the mirth in which we indulge at
their expense, when we see these creatures upon a stage, seems to be
a sort of indemnification which we make to ourselves for the terror
which they put us in when reading made them an object of
belief,--when we surrendered up our reason to the poet, as children
to their nurses and their elders; and we laugh at our fears, as
children, who thought they saw something in the dark, triumph when
the bringing in of a candle discovers the vanity of their fears. For
this exposure of supernatural agents upon a stage is truly bringing
in a candle to expose their own delusiveness. It is the solitary
taper and the book that generates a faith in these terrors: a ghost
by chandelier light, and in good company, deceives no spectators,--a
ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his human dimensions made
out