the means of setting it off with lustre, and ought to engross
but little attention; as it is more important to hear what a character
speaks, than to observe the place where he stands; but now the case is
altered. The scenes in a Harlequin Sorcerer, and other unmeaning
pantomimes, unknown to our more elegant and judging fore-fathers,
procure crowded houses, while the noblest strokes of Dryden, the
delicate touches of Otway and Rowe, the wild majesty of Shakespear,
and the heart-felt language of Lee, pass neglected, when put in
competition with those gewgaws of the stage, these feasts of the eye;
which as they can communicate no ideas, so they can neither warm nor
reform the heart, nor answer one moral purpose in nature.

We ought not to omit a cirrumstance much in favour of Sir William
Davenant, which proves him to have been as good a man as a poet. When
at the Restoration, those who had been active in disturbing the late
reign, and secluding their sovereign from the throne, became obnoxious
to the royal party, Milton was likely to feel the vengeance of the
court, Davenant actuated by a noble principle of gratitude, interposed
all his influence, and saved the greatest ornament of the world from
the stroke of an executioner. Ten years before that, Davenant had been
rescued by Milton, and he remembered the favour; an instance, this,
that generosity, gratitude, and nobleness of nature is confined to no
particular party; but the heart of a good man will still discover
itself in acts of munificence and kindness, however mistaken he may be
in his opinion, however warm in state factions. The particulars of
this extraordinary affair are related in the life of Milton.

Sir William Davenant continued at the head of his company of actors,
and at last transferred them to a new and magnificent theatre built in
Dorset-Gardens, where some of his old plays were revived with very
singular circumstances of royal kindness, and a new one when brought
upon the stage met with great applause.

The last labour of his pen was in altering a play of Shakespear's,
called the Tempest, so as to render it agreeable to that age, or
rather susceptible of those theatrical improvements he had brought
into fashion. The great successor to his laurel, in a preface to this
play, in which he was concerned with Davenant, 'says, that he was a
man of quick and piercing imagination, and soon found that somewhat
might be added to the design of Shakespear, of whic