Page:The Plays of William Shakspeare (1778).djvu/34

22 for reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a ingle moment, was ever credited.

The objection ariing from the impoibility of paing the firt hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, uppoes, that when the play opens the pectator really imagines himelf at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine more. He that can take the tage at one time for the palace of the Ptolemies, may take it in half an hour for the promontory of Actium. Deluion, if deluion be admitted, has no certain limitation; if the pectator can be once peruaded, that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Cæar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharalia, or the bank of Granicus, he is in a tate of elevation above the reach of reaon, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry, may depie the circumcriptions of terretrial nature. There is no reaon why a mind thus wandering in ectay hould count the clock, or why an hour hould not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can make the tage a field.

The truth is, that the pectators are always in their enes, and know, from the firt act to the lat, that the tage is only a tage, and that the players are only players. They come to hear a certain number of lines recited with jut geture and elegant modulation. The lines relate to ome action, and an action mut be