m; he
knows with certainty that he has not changed his place; and he knows that
place cannot change itself; that what was a house cannot become a plain;
that what was Thebes can never be Persepolis.

Such is the triumphant language with which a critick exults over the
misery of an irregular poet, and exults commonly without resistance or
reply. It is time therefore to tell him, by the authority of Shakespeare,
that he assumes, as an unquestionable principle, a position, which, while
his breath is forming it into words, his understanding pronounces to be
false. It is false that any representation is mistaken for reality; that
any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single
moment, was ever credited.

The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at
Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes that when the play opens the
spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his
walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the
days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine
more. He that can take the stage at one time for the palace of the
Ptolemies, may take it in half an hour for the promontory of Actium.
Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation; if the
spectator can be once persuaded that his old acquaintance are Alexander
and Caesar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia,
or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of
reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry may despise
the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is no reason why a mind
thus wandering in ecstasy should count the clock, or why an hour should
not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can make the stage a
field.

The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know,
from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that
the players are only players. They come to hear a certain number of lines
recited with just gesture and elegant modulation. The lines relate to some
action, and an action must be in some place; but the different actions
that complete a story may be in places very remote from each other; and
where is the absurdity of allowing that space to represent first Athens,
and then Sicily, which was always known to be neither Sicily nor Athens,
but a modern theatre.

By supposition, as place is