o a
theatre, the greatly better acting of the Edinburgh company failed to
satisfy me now. The few plays, however, which I saw enacted chanced to
be of a rather mediocre character, and gave no scope for the exhibition
of nice histrionic talent; nor were any of the great actors of the south
on the Edinburgh boards at the time. The stage scenery, too, though
quite fine enough of its kind, had, I found, altogether a different
effect upon me from the one which it had been elaborated to produce. In
perusing our fine old dramas, it was the truth of nature that the
vividly-drawn scenes and figures, and the happily-portrayed characters,
always suggested; whereas the painted canvas, and the respectable but
yet too palpable acting, served but to unrealize what I saw, and to
remind me that I was merely in a theatre. Further, I deemed it too large
a price to devote a whole evening to see some play acted which, mayhap,
as a composition I would not have deemed worth the reading; and so the
temptation of play-going failed to tempt me; and latterly, when my
comrades set out for the playhouse, I stayed at home. Whatever the
nature of the process through which they have gone, a considerable
proportion of the more intelligent mechanics of the present generation
seem to have landed in conclusions similar to the one at which I at this
time arrived. At least, for every dozen of the class that frequented the
theatre thirty years ago, there is scarce one that frequents it now. I
have said that the scenery of the stage made no very favourable
impression upon me. Some parts of it must, however, have made a
considerably stronger one than I could have supposed at the time.
Fourteen years after, when the whole seemed to have passed out of
memory, I was lying ill of small-pox, which, though a good deal modified
apparently by the vaccination of a long anterior period, was accompanied
by such a degree of fever, that for two days together one delirious
image continued to succeed another in the troubled sensorium, as scene
succeeds scene in the box of an itinerant showman. As is not uncommon,
however, in such cases, though ill enough to be haunted by the images, I
was yet well enough to know that they were idle unrealities, the mere
effects of indisposition; and even sufficiently collected to take an
interest in watching them as they arose, and in striving to determine
whether they were linked together by the ordinary associative ties. I
found, however, t