He maintains that if an actor should really show a character in such light that we could not tell the impersonation from the reality, the stage would lose its interest.

I do not think so.

We should draw back, of course, from physical suffering; but yet we should be charmed to suppose anything real, which we had desired to see.

If we felt that we really met Cardinal Wolsey or Henry VIII.

in his days of glory, would it not be a lifelong memory to us, very different from the effect of the stage, and if for a few moments we really _felt_ that we had met them, would it not lift us into a new kind of being?
"What would we not give to see Julius Caesar and the soothsayer, just as they stood in Rome as Shakspere represents them?
Why, we travel hundreds of miles to see the places noted for the doings of these old Romans; and if we could be made to believe that we met one of the smaller men, even, of that day, our ecstasy would be unbounded.