and insinuating;
but his secondary or supplemental voice still more decisively
histrionic than his common one. It was reserved for the spectator; and
the dramatis personae were supposed to know nothing at all about it.
The _lies_ of young Wilding, and the _sentiments_ in Joseph Surface,
were thus marked out in a sort of italics to the audience. This secret
correspondence with the company before the curtain (which is the
bane and death of tragedy) has an extremely happy effect in some
kinds of comedy, in the more highly artificial comedy of Congreve
or of Sheridan especially, where the absolute sense of reality (so
indispensable to scenes of interest) is not required, or would rather
interfere to diminish your pleasure. The fact is, you do not believe
in such characters as Surface--the villain of artificial comedy--even
while you read or see them. If you did, they would shock and not
divert you. When Ben, in Love 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
gave us--but a piece of a 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