"When I was a boy, I went once to a theatre.

The tragedy of Hamlet was performed: a play full of the noblest thoughts, the subtlest morality, that exists upon the stage.

The audience listened with attention, with admiration, with applause.

I said to myself, when the curtain fell, 'It must be a glorious thing to obtain this empire over men's intellects and emotions.' But now an Italian mountebank appeared on the stage,--a man of extraordinary personal strength and slight of hand.

He performed a variety of juggling tricks, and distorted his body into a thousand surprising and unnatural postures.