misery of an irregular poet, and exults commonly without resistance
or reply. It is time therefore to tell him, by the authority
of Shakespeare, that he assumes, as an unquestionable principle,
a position, which, while his breath is forming it into words,
his understanding pronounces to be false. It is false, that any
representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable
in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was
ever credited.

The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first
hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the
play opens the spectator really imagines himself 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 stage
at one time for the palace of the Ptolemies, may take it in half
an hour for the promontory of Actium. Delusion, if delusion be
admitted, has no certain limitation; if the spectator can be once
persuaded, that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Caesar, that
a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the
bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of
reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry, may
despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is no
reason why a mind thus wandering in extasy should count the clock,
or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the
brains that can make the stage a field.

The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses,
and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only
a stage, and that the players are only players. They come to hear