Nor were these creative gestures quite unknown to QUINTILIAN, who has nobly compared them to the lashings of the lion's tail, rousing him to combat.

Actors of genius have accustomed themselves to walk on the stage for an hour before the curtain was drawn, that they might fill their minds with all the phantoms of the drama, and so suspend all communion with the external world.

The great actress of our age, during representation, always had the door of her dressing-room open, that she might listen to, and if possible watch the whole performance, with the same attention as was experienced by the spectators.

By this means she possessed herself of all the illusion of the scene; and when she herself entered on the stage, her dreaming thoughts then brightened into a vision, where the perceptions of the soul were as firm and clear as if she were really the Constance or the Katherine whom she only represented.[A] [Footnote A: The late Mrs.SIDDONS.She herself communicated this striking circumstance to me.] Aware of this peculiar faculty, so prevalent in the more vivid exercise of genius, Lord KAIMES seems to have been the first who, in a work on criticism, attempted to name _the ideal presence_, to distinguish it from the _real presence_ of things.

It has been called the representative faculty, the imaginative state, and many other states and faculties.