DISAPPOINTED WITH THE STAGE. 143 



dramatic poetry that I was now displeased with both 

 actors and the stage. The stage I regarded as merely a 

 little area floored with fir deal and surrounded by painted 

 sheets ; the actors as a company of indifferent-looking 

 people who could bear no comparison with either the 

 ideal dramatis personce of my imagination, or the real 

 characters whom I had seen acting their parts in the great 

 drama of life. On the evening I first sat in the Theatre 

 Royal of Edinburgh, I felt as if, after having admired an 

 exquisite portrait, which the art of the painter had almost 

 awakened into life, I should be asked whether I could 

 not recognize the original of it in an inanimate image 

 of wax/ 



