Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be revolting, or rather in real life could not have co-existed with the warm-hearted temperament of the character. But when you read it in the spirit with which such playful selections and specious combinations rather than strict _metaphrases_ of nature should be taken, or when you saw Bannister play it, it neither did, nor does wound the moral sense at all. For what is Ben--the pleasant sailor which Bannister gives us--but a piece of satire--a creation of Congreve's fancy--a dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor's character--his contempt of money--his credulity to women--with that necessary estrangement from home which it is just within the verge of credibility to suppose _might_ produce such an hallucination as is here described. We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his character. But when an actor comes, and instead of the delightful phantom--the creature dear to half-belief--which Bannister exhibited--displays before our eyes a downright concretion of a Wapping sailor--a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar--and nothing else--when instead of investing it with a delicious confusedness of the head, and a veering undirected goodness of purpose--he gives to it a downright daylight understanding, and a full consciousness of its actions; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the character with a pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by them alone--we feel the discord of the thing; the scene is disturbed; a real man has got in among the dramatis personæ, and puts them out. We want the sailor turned out. We feel that his true place is not behind the curtain but in the first or second gallery. [Footnote 1:_Clown_. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl? _Mal_. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. _Clown_. What thinkest thou of his opinion? _Mal_. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion.] [Footnote 2: Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his death a choice collection of old English literature. I should judge him to have been a man of wit. I know one instance of an impromptu which no length of study could have bettered. My merry friend, Jem White, had seen him one evening in Aguecheek, and recognising Dodd the next day in Fleet Street, was irresistibly impelled to take off his hat and salute him as the identical Knight of the preceding evening with a "Save you, _Sir Andrew_." Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this unusual address from a stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking wave of the hand, put him off with an "Away, _Fool_."] [Footnote 3: High Life Below Stairs.] ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY