and often a highly artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at in that form of composition by any gift short of intuition.  We do here as we do with novels written in the epistolary form.  How many improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with in Clarissa and other books, for the sake of the delight which that form upon the whole gives us!

But the practice of stage-representation reduces everything to a controversy of elocution.  Every character, from the boisterous blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must play the orator.  The love dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those silver-sweet sounds of lovers’ tongues by night! the more intimate and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so delightful in the reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in Paradise—­

                                “As beseem’d
  Fair couple link’d in happy nuptial league,
  Alone;”

by the inherent fault of stage-representation, how are these things sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed at the spectators, who are to judge of her endearments and her returns of love!

The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest ambition to distinguish themselves.  The length of the part may be one of their reasons.  But for the character itself, we find it in a play, and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic representation.  The play itself abounds in maxims and reflections beyond any other, and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle for conveying moral instruction.  But Hamlet himself—­what does he suffer meanwhile by being dragged forth as the public schoolmaster, to give lectures to the crowd!  Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are transactions between himself and his moral sense; they are the effusions of his solitary musings, which he retires to holes and corners and the most sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth; or rather, they are the silent meditations with which his bosom is bursting, reduced to words for the sake of the reader, who must else remain ignorant of what is passing there.  These profound sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring ruminations, which the tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and chambers, how can they be represented by a gesticulating actor, who comes and mouths them out before an audience, making four hundred people his confidants at once!  I say not that it is the fault of the actor so to do; he must pronounce them ore rotundo; he must accompany them with his eye; he must insinuate them into his auditory by some trick of eye, tone or gesture, or he fails. He must be thinking all the while of his appearance, because he knows that all the while the spectators are judging of it.  And this is the way to represent the shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet!