f I had seen a ghost, I should have
looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did. And then to be
sure, in that scene, as you called it, between him and his mother, where
you told me he acted so fine, why any man, that is, any good man, that
had such a mother, would have done exactly the same. I know you are
only joking with me; but indeed, madam, though I never was at a play in
London, yet I have seen acting before in the country, and the King for
my money; he speaks all his words distinctly, and half as loud again as
the other. Anybody may see he is an actor.'"

In this excellent passage Partridge is represented as a very bad
theatrical critic. But none of those who laugh at him possess the tithe
of his sensibility to theatrical excellence. He admires in the wrong
place; but he trembles in the right place. It is indeed because he is
so much excited by the acting of Garrick, that he ranks him below the
strutting, mouthing performer, who personates the King. So, we have
heard it said that, in some parts of Spain and Portugal, an actor who
should represent a depraved character finely, instead of calling down
the applauses of the audience, is hissed and pelted without mercy.
It would be the same in England, if we, for one moment, thought that
Shylock or Iago was standing before us. While the dramatic art was in
its infancy at Athens, it produced similar effects on the ardent and
imaginative spectators. It is said that they blamed Aeschylus for
frightening them into fits with his Furies. Herodotus tells us that,
when Phyrnichus produced his tragedy on the fall of Miletus, they fined
him in a penalty of a thousand drachmas for torturing their feelings by
so pathetic an exhibition. They did not regard him as a great artist,
but merely as a man who had given them pain. When they woke from the
distressing illusion, they treated the author of it as they would have
treated a messenger who should have brought them fatal and alarming
tidings which turned out to be false. In the same manner, a child
screams with terror at the sight of a person in an ugly mask. He has
perhaps seen the mask put on. But his imagination is too strong for his
reason; and he entreats that it may be taken off.

We should act in the same manner if the grief and horror produced in us
by works of the imagination amounted to real torture. But in us these
emotions are comparatively languid. They rarely affect our appetite or
our sleep. They leave us