We do here as we do with novels written in the _epistolary form_.

How many improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with in Clarissa and other books, for the sake of the delight which that form upon the whole gives us! But the practice of stage-representation reduces everything to a controversy of elocution.

Every character, from the boisterous blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must play the orator.

The love dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night! the more intimate and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so delightful in the reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in Paradise-- "As beseem'd Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league, Alone;" by the inherent fault of stage-representation, how are these things sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed at the spectators, who are to judge of her endearments and her returns of love! The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest ambition to distinguish themselves.

The length of the part may be one of their reasons.