ve for Love, returns from sea, the
following exquisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting with his
father--

_Sir Sampson._ Thou hast been many a weary league, Ben, since I saw
thee.

_Ben._ Ey, ey, been! Been far enough, an that be all.--Well, father,
and how do all at home? how does brother Dick, and brother Val?

_Sir Sampson._ Dick! body o' me, Dick has been dead these two years. I
writ you word when you were at Leghorn.

_Ben._ Mess, that's true; Marry, I had forgot. Dick's dead, as you
say--Well, and how?--I have a many questions to ask you--

Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be
revolting, or rather in real life could not have co-existed with the
warm-hearted temperament of the character. But when you read it in the
spirit with which such playful selections and specious combinations
rather than strict _metaphrases_ of nature should be taken, or when
you saw Bannister play it, it neither did, nor does wound the moral
sense at all. For what is Ben--the pleasant sailor which Bannister
gives us--but a piece of satire--a creation of Congreve's fancy--a
dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor's character--his
contempt of money--his credulity to women--with that necessary
estrangement from home which it is just within the verge of
credibility to suppose _might_ produce such an hallucination as is
here described. We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as
a stain upon his character. But when an actor comes, and instead
of the delightful phantom--the creature dear to half-belief--which
Bannister exhibited--displays before our eyes a downright concretion
of a Wapping sailor--a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar--and nothing
else--when instead of investing it with a delicious confusedness of
the head, and a veering undirected goodness of purpose--he gives to it
a downright daylight understanding, and a full consciousness of its
actions; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the character with a
pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by
them alone--we feel the discord of the thing; the scene is disturbed;
a real man has got in among the dramatis personae, and puts them out.
We want the sailor turned out. We feel that his true place is not
behind the curtain but in the first or second gallery.

[Footnote 1:_Clown_. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild
fowl?
_Mal_. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.
_Clown_. Wh