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transaction as purely fictitious, and ascribing the delusion of the parties concerned, to natural causes ;

THES.

I never may

believe

These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers, and madmen, have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.—
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy ;
Or, in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos'd a bear?

Act v. sc. 1.

When he introduces his elves as addressing some of the principal characters, it is in the assumed voice, and borrowed person of their associates; their intervention, in this respect, is thus projected by the chief of the fairies:

OBER. Hie, therefore, Robin, overcast the night;
The starry welkin cover thou anon

With drooping fog, as black as Acheron;
And lead these testy rivals so astray,

As one come not within another's way.
Like to Lysander sometime frame thy tongue,
Then stir Demetrius up with bitter wrong;
And sometime rail thou like Demetrius;

And from each other look thou lead them thus,

X

Till o'er their brows death-counterfeiting sleep
With leaden legs and batty wings, doth creep;
Then crush this herb into Lysander's eye,
Whose liquor hath this virtuous property,
To take from thence all errour, with his might,
And make his eye-balls roll with wonted sight.
When they next wake all this derision
Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision;
And back to Athens shall the lovers wend,

With league, whose date till death shall never end.
Act iii. sc. 2.

It is to an illiterate mechanick alone that he represents his spiritual agents as being visibly manifested; yet even he is dismissed under the impression that all that he witnessed is the effect of a dream.

[As they go out Bottom awakes.]

"Hey, ho!-Peter Quince! Flute, the bellows-mender! Snout, the tinker! Starveling! God's my life! stolen hence, and left me asleep! I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream;-past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I wasthere is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had.—But man is but a patch'd fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen; man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream."Act iv. sc. 1.

was.

Thus it is not to be disputed, that Shakespeare has not only had so much respect to the superstitious notions of his characters as not to offer them any open violence; but from the state of mental delusion in which he supposes them placed, his fictions are rendered as probable as seemed possible; indeed perfectly so on the part of those who may be conceived at all concerned in believing them, and with whose opinions they are supposed to be at variance. That in this process he has left the spectator no reasonable grounds of complaints, in introducing those beings to his observation, which were favoured by his popular prejudices, in preference to the deities of a mythology which he must have rejected as impossible, need not be any longer insisted on. Upon the whole, while, in vindication of that rule which he has here cited to illustrate, it may be observed, that his practice would have approached more near to perfection had he adhered more closely to its letter: it must be at the same time allowed, that he cannot be convicted of running counter to its spirit.

It seems scarcely necessary to prolong the consideration of the present question with another observation, relative to the impro

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priety of introducing that machinery into the drama which is exclusively adapted to the poetical epos: although it is that which is most consonant to the belief of the poet's characters, as well as his readers or spectators. Whatever may be its perfections in this respect, although it is particularly calculated to awaken the spectator's interest, and to excite his admiration, it seems to be for ever excluded from finding a place on our stages. entertainments of the theatrical kind, we can allow, among intellectual amusements, no higher praise than that of being elegant or rational; and even to this commendation they seem to be but rarely entitled: but the sacred beings by whose ministration, we are taught to believe, Providence has engaged in sublunary affairs, are not to be regarded without sentiments of reverence; we cannot therefore easily pardon the attempt of him who would so far degrade them as to ascribe them a part in the action of a fable, which was merely intended to promote amusement, and on a stage which has been often prostituted to the worst purposes. Such a project, if realized, we should condemn as profane; and surely the production on which we should pass such a sentence, however it

might excite our disgust or horrour, could contribute nothing to our gratification. By this limitation, however, the drama is not so materially affected as may be at first imagined: such subjects as find a place in it generally consist in events of that secondary importance, that they cannot be supposed to engage the celestial interference, if with any propriety they could be committed to the celestial superintendance.

II. From the determination of these points I proceed, in order, to the discussion of that which was proposed for examination in the second place; when a poet is at liberty to introduce the spiritual agency among the actual incidents of his composition.

This is a question of which there has been offered more than one solution: for the mechanism of the antient theatre being of that unskilful and inconvenient kind, which discouraged the introduction of their divinities into the dramatick action, to exclude them as much as possible from appearing in the scene, became a desirable. object to the poet and the spectator. As machinery was on this account scarcely employed, unless when there was an absolute

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