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audience ; that whatever higher aims the dramatic poet 

 may have in view, unless he amuses and sustains atten- 

 tion, he has failed." Again, amusement is the prelimi- 

 nary condition — if that fail all fails ; and finally he asks 

 the question he believes unanswerable, and which he has 

 husbanded as a coup de hattaille. " Did you ever, in the 

 whole course of your life, book the two first seats in tho 

 boxes, or shield your wife from the crush at the pit door, 

 under the impression that your passions were to be puri- 

 fied, and next Sunday's sermon anticipated?" I need 

 scarcely remark, in reply to this last question, that were 

 no loftier ingenuity manifested in the construction of any 

 great work than is ordinarily brought to the contempla- 

 tion of it, chaos would indeed be come again. If an in- 

 telligent apprehension of the motive of the designer, or 

 even of his expressed moral be necessary in those ap- 

 pealed to, then the sun, and the stars, and the flowers by 

 the way-side, have made their daily pleading since the 

 world stood Avith little effect. If the degradation of an 

 audience is the measure of a prophet's inspiration, then 

 indeed are all the lessons of the Creator's wisdom read in 

 vain, is the mission of the teacher ended, and the very 

 idea of improvement shut out. 



Accepting the reviewer's data, that the plays are not to 

 be judged as poems, that the conditions imder which the 

 noblest literature of any age was framed, was primarily 

 that of amusing an audience, and that this was its necessity, 

 the "be all and end all" of its designer's piu-pose, it would 

 perhaps be as well to add to them the reasons for such a 

 belief as far as they can be discerned ; and for the very 

 supposition that Shakspere was a careless inartistic drama- 

 tist of wonderful power, facility, even genius, satisfied 

 with the reputation he achieved in his own day, and 

 neither emulous of honourable remembrance nor supreme 

 distinction. They seem principally these : — 

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