To the lowest deeps of the lowest depths of the unfathomed social misery of that time, the new philosopher, the Poet of the Advancement of Learning, will himself descend; and drag up to the eye of day,--undeterred by any scruple of poetic sensibility,--in his own unborrowed habiliments, with all the badges of _his_ position in the state upon him, the creature he has selected as one of the representatives of the social state as he finds it;--the creature he has selected as the representative of those loathsome, unpenetrated masses of _human_ life, which the unscientific social state must needs generate. For the design of this play, in its exhibition of the true human need, in its new and large exhibition of the ground which the Arts of a true and rational human civilization must cover, could not but include the _defects_ of that, which passed for civilization then. It involved necessarily, indeed, the most searching and relentless criticisms of the existing institutions of that time. That cry of social misery which pervades it, in which the natural, and social, and artificial evils are still discriminated through all the most tragic bursts of passion--in which the true social need, in all its comprehension, is uttered--that wild cry of human anguish, prolonged, and repeated, and reverberated as it is--is all one outcry upon the social wisdom of the Poet's time. It constitutes one continuous dramatic expression and embodiment of that so deeply-rooted opinion which the New Philosopher is known to have entertained, in regard to the practical knowledge of mankind as he found it; his opinion of the real advances towards the true human ends which had been made in his time; an opinion which he has, indeed, taken occasion to express elsewhere with some distinctness, considering the conditions which hampered the expression of his philosophical conclusions; but it is one which could hardly have been produced from the philosophic chair in his time, or from the bench, or at the council-table, in such terms as we find him launching out into here, without any fear or scruple. For those who persuade themselves that it was any part of this player's intention to bring out, for the amusement of his audiences, an historical exhibition of the Life and Times of that ancient Celtic king of Britain, whose legendary name and chronicle he has appropriated so effectively, will be prevented by that view of the subject from ever attaining the least inkling of the matter here. For this Magician has quite other work in hand. He does not put his girdles round the earth, and enforce and harass with toil his delicate spirits,--he does not get out his book and staff, and put on his Enchanter's robe, for any such kind of effect as that. For this is not any antiquary at all, but the true Prospero; and when a little more light has been brought into his cell, his garments will be found to be, like the disguised Edgar's--'_Persian_.'