at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted house, and a well-dressed
audience, shall arm the most nervous child against any apprehensions:
as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles with his
impenetrable armor over it, "Bully Dawson would have fought the devil
with such advantages."

Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile
mixture which Dryden has thrown into the Tempest: doubtless, without
some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have
sat out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the
sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the tempest of
Shakspeare at all a subject for stage-representation? It is one thing
to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we
are reading it; but to have a conjurer brought before us in his
conjuring gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself
and some hundred of favored spectators before the curtain are
supposed to see, involves such a quantity of the _hateful
incredible_, that all our reverence for the author cannot hinder us
from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in the
highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot
be represented, they cannot even be painted,--they can only be
believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which
the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary
effect to what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of
familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays
which appeal to the higher faculties positively destroys the illusion
which it is introduced to aid. A parlor or a drawing-room,--a library
opening into a garden--a garden with an alcove in it,--a street, or
the piazza of Covent Garden, does well enough in a scene; we are
content to give as much credit to it as it demands; or rather, we
think little about it,--it is little more than reading at the top of
a page, "Scene, a garden;" we do not imagine ourselves there, but we
readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. But to think by the
help of painted trees and caverns, which we know to be painted, to
transport our minds to Prospero, and his island and his lonely
cell;[1] or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an
interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear those
supernatural noises of which the isle was full: the Orrery Lecturer
at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his musica