In short, there is in their whole nature, a more roving, liberal, Continental character of dissipation, than belongs to the cold, tame, dull, prim, hedge-clipped indolence of more national exquisitism.

Into this set, out of the other set, fell young Godolphin; and oh! the merry mornings at actresses' houses; the jovial suppers after the play; the buoyancy, the brilliancy, the esprit, with which the hours, from midnight to cockcrow, were often pelted with rose-leaves and drowned in Rhenish.
By degrees, however, as Godolphin warmed into his attendance at the playhouses, the fine intellectual something that lay yet undestroyed at his heart stirred up emotions which he felt his more vulgar associates were unfitted to share.
There is that in theatrical representation which perpetually awakens whatever romance belongs to our character.

The magic lights; the pomp of scene; the palace, the camp; the forest; the midnight wold; the moonlight reflected on the water; the melody of the tragic rhythm; the grace of the comic wit; the strange art that give such meaning to the poet's lightest word;--the fair, false, exciting life that is detailed before us--crowding into some three little hours all that our most busy ambition could desire--love, enterprise, war, glory! the kindling exaggeration of the sentiments which belong to the stage--like our own in our boldest moments: all these appeals to our finer senses are not made in vain.

Our taste for castle-building and visions deepens upon us; and we chew a mental opium which stagnates all the other faculties, but wakens that of the ideal.
Godolphin was peculiarly fascinated by the stage; he loved to steal away from his companions, and, alone, and unheeded, to feast his mind on the unreal stream of existence that mirrored images so beautiful.

And oh! while yet we are young--while yet the dew lingers on the green leaf of spring--while all the brighter, the more enterprising part of the future is to come--while we know not whether the true life may not be visionary and excited as the false--how deep and rich a transport is it to see, to feel, to hear Shakspeare's conceptions made actual, though all imperfectly, and only for an hour! Sweet Arden! are we in thy forest ?--thy "shadowy groves and unfrequented glens"?
Rosalind, Jaques, Orlando, have you indeed a being upon earth! Ah! this is true enchantment! and when we turn back to life, we turn from the colours which the Claude glass breathes over a winter's landscape to the nakedness of the landscape itself!.