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
parlour 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;[9] 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
musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind his apparatus,
to make us believe that we do indeed hear the chrystal spheres ring
out that chime, which if it were to inwrap our fancy long, Milton
thinks,

Time would run back and fetch the age of gold,
And speckled vanity
Would sicken soon and die,
And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould;
Yea Hell itself would pass away,
And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day.

The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more
impossible to be shown on a stage, than the Enchanted Isle, with its
no less interesting and innocent first settlers.

[9] It will be said these things are done in pictures. But
pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a
world of itself, but in scene-painting there is the attempt
to deceive; and there is the discordancy, never to be got
over, between painted scenes and real people.

The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the Dresses,
which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last
time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of
garment which he varied--the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish
priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity
of the public eye, require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish
monarch was fairly a count