tances of the most marvellous imagination. But
they were as purely fictitious as Caliban or Ariel. They borrowed from
the infinite riches of the poet their noble or tender thoughts; but
whenever he tried to make them more than abstractions--to unite them to
the sympathies of his audience--or to clothe them in real flesh and
blood--look at the means he takes--listen to the conversations of Miss
Juliet and the songs of Ophelia--and you will perceive what were the
lessons his experience in actual men and women had taught him.

It is impossible, my dear Smith, for a Frenchman to write an English
comedy--and why? Because the turn of his mind, and unacquaintance with
the peculiarities of our dispositions, unfit him for it. But not more
separated from us is the Parisian Feuilletonist by his language and
manners, not to mention the Channel, than the author of Elizabeth's and
James's days by the lapse of two hundred years, and the total alteration
of our modes of thought; and yet how frightfully you would be laughed at
for applying the remark to Shakspeare, though, between ourselves, my
dear fellow, he is the very man to call it forth! Oh, how vividly I can
fancy the exclamations of Jiggles of the Victoria, or Pumpkins of the
Stepney Temple of Thespis! "He is the poet of all time!" says Jiggles,
with a thump on the table that sets all the pewter pots dancing. "Do you
mean, Mr Bobson," cries Pumpkins, with a triumphant curl of his lip, "to
say, that the laws of nature are transitory as the fashion of a coat,
and that what was nature at one period will not be nature at another?"
If he should ask you this question, my dear sir, tell him at once that
that is decidedly your opinion, or, if it is not, tell him that it is
most unquestionably mine; for most assuredly the same train of thought
that would be natural among the chiefs of the Druids, would be most
absurdly out of character if attributed to the bench of Bishops. "Oho!"
exclaims Pumpkins, "what has the bench of Bishops to do with it? We
maintain that Shakspeare, or any one else, having written a play wherein
the sentiments of the Druids were once true to nature, those sentiments
will continue true to nature to the end of time."

By no means, Mr Pumpkins. Certain sentiments were _thought_ true to
nature by the critics and audience at the beginning of the seventeenth
century; but nature, like every thing else, assumes a different
appearance according to the point it is viewed fr