_Ben_. Ey, ey, been! Been far enough, an that be all--Well father, and how do all at home? how does brother Dick, and brother Val? _Sir Sampson_. Dick! body o' me, Dick has been dead these two years. I writ you word when you were at Leghorn. _Ben_. Mess, that's true; Marry, I had forgot. Dick's dead, as you say--Well, and how?--I have a many questions to ask you-- 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 gave us--but a piece of a 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. (_To be resumed occasionally_.) ELIA. [Footnote 1: How lovelily the Adriatic whore Dress'd in her flames will shine--devouring flames-- Such as will burn her to her wat'ry bottom, And hiss in her foundation. _Pierre, in Venice Preserved._] [Footnote 2: _Viola_. She took the ring from me; I'll none of it. _Mal_. Come, Sir, you peevishly threw it to her; and her will is, it should be so returned. If it be worth stooping for, there it lies in your eye; if not, be it his that finds it.]