dramatic form? Well! I have wondered at you
sometimes, not for daring, but for bearing to trust your noble works
into the great mill of the 'rank, popular' playhouse, to be ground to
pieces between the teeth of vulgar actors and actresses. I, for one,
would as soon have 'my soul among lions.' 'There is a fascination in
it,' says Miss Mitford, and I am sure there must be, to account for
it. Publics in the mass are bad enough; but to distil the dregs of the
public and baptise oneself in that acrid moisture, where can be the
temptation? I could swear by Shakespeare, as was once sworn 'by those
dead at Marathon,' that I do not see where. I love the drama too. I
look to our old dramatists as to our Kings and princes in poetry. I
love them through all the deeps of their abominations. But the theatre
in those days was a better medium between the people and the poet; and
the press in those days was a less sufficient medium than now. Still,
the poet suffered by the theatre even then; and the reasons are very
obvious.

How true--how true ... is all you say about critics. My convictions
follow you in every word. And I delighted to read your views of the
poet's right aspect towards criticism--I read them with the most
complete appreciation and sympathy. I have sometimes thought that it
would be a curious and instructive process, as illustrative of the
wisdom and apprehensiveness of critics, if anyone would collect the
critical soliloquies of every age touching its own literature, (as far
as such may be extant) and _confer_ them with the literary product of
the said ages. Professor Wilson has begun something of the kind
apparently, in his initiatory paper of the last _Blackwood_ number on
critics, beginning with Dryden--but he seems to have no design in his
notice--it is a mere critique on the critic. And then, he should have
begun earlier than Dryden--earlier even than Sir Philip Sydney, who in
the noble 'Discourse on Poetry,' gives such singular evidence of being
stone-critic-blind to the gods who moved around him. As far as I can
remember, he saw even Shakespeare but indifferently. Oh, it was in his
eyes quite an unillumed age, that period of Elizabeth which _we_ see
full of suns! and few can see what is close to the eyes though they
run their heads against it; the denial of contemporary genius is the
rule rather than the exception. No one counts the eagles in the nest,
till there is a rush of wings; and lo! they are flown. And h