ng
these beings 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 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 armour 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 sate
out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet
courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the _Tempest_ of
Shakespeare 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 favoured 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