But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended.

That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid.

A parlor or a drawing-room,--a library opening into a garden--a garden with an alcove in it,--a street, or the piazza of Covent Garden, does well enough in a scene; we are content to give as much credit to it as it demands; or rather, we think little about it,--it is little more than reading at the top of a page, "Scene, a garden;" we do not imagine ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of familiar objects.

But to think by the help of painted trees and caverns, which we know to be painted, to transport our minds to Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell;[1] or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the isle was full: the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind his apparatus, to make us believe that we do indeed hear the crystal spheres ring out that chime, which if it were to enwrap our fancy long, Milton thinks, "Time would run back and fetch the age of gold, And speckled Vanity Would sicken soon and die, And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould; Yea, Hell itself would pass away, And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day." [Footnote 1: It will be said these things are done in pictures.

But pictures and scenes are very different things.