making, and poison-brewing, and choking by sulphur. From the Palace esplanade, where music plays while Serene Highness is pleased to eat his victuals, down to the low lane, where in her doorsill the aged widow, knitting for a thin livelihood, sits to feel the afternoon sun, I see it all; for, except the Schlosskirche weather-cock, no biped stands so high. Couriers arrive bestrapped and bebooted, bearing joy and sorrow bagged up in pouches of leather; there, top-laden, and with four swift horses, rolls in the country Baron and his household; here, on timber-leg, the lamed soldier hops painfully along, begging alms: a thousand carriages, and wains, and cars, come tumbling in with food, with young rusticity, and other raw produce, inanimate or animate, and go tumbling out again with produce manufactured. That living flood, pouring through these streets, of all qualities and ages, knowest thou whence it is coming, whither it is going? From Eternity, onwards to Eternity! These are apparitions: what else? Are they not Souls rendered visible: in Bodies that took shape and will lose it, melting into air? Their solid pavement is a picture of the sense; they walk on the bosom of Nothing, blank Time is behind

them and before them. Or fanciest thou, the red-and-yellow Clothes-screen yonder, with spurs on its heels and feather in its crown, is but of to-day, without a yesterday or a tomorrow; and had not rather its ancestor alive when Hengst and Horsa overran thy Island? Friend, thou seest here a living link in that tissue of history, which inweaves all Being: watch well, or it will be past thee, and seen no

more.

Ah, dear friend, it is true sublimity to dwell here. These fringes of lamplight, struggling up through smoke and thousand-fold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of Night, what thinks Boötes of them, as he leads his hunting-dogs over the zenith in their leash of sidereal fire? That stifled hum of midnight, when traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to halls roofed in, and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like nightbirds, are abroad; that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is heard in Heaven! Oh, under that hideous coverlet of vapors, and putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, what a fer

menting vat lies simmering and hid! The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are being born; men are praying, - on the other side of a brick partition, men are cursing; and around them all is the vast, void Night. The proud Grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes within damask curtains; Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers hunger-stricken into its lair of straw: in obscure cellars, Rougeet-Noir languidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard hungry Villains; while Councillors of State sit plotting, and playing their high chess game, whereof the pawns are Men. The Lover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready; and she, full of hope and fear, glides down, to fly with him over the borders: the Thief, still more silently, sets to his picklocks and crowbars, or lurks in wait till the watchmen first snore in their boxes. Gay mansions, with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms, are full of light and music and high-swelling hearts; but in the condemned cells, the pulse of life beats tremulous and faint, and bloodshot eyes look out through the darkness, which is around and within, for the light of a stern last morning. Six men are to be hanged on the morrow:

comes no hammering from the Rabenstein ? — their gallows must even now be o'building. Upwards of five hundred thousand two-legged animals without feathers lie round us, in horizontal positions; their heads all in nightcaps, and full of the foolishest dreams. Riot cries aloud and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame; and the Mother, with streaming hair, kneels over her pallid dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears now moisten. -All these heaped and huddled together, with nothing but a little carpentry and masonry between them; crammed in, like salted fish in their barrel; or weltering, shall I say, like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each struggling to get its head above the others; such work goes on under that smoke counterpane! — But I, my friend, sit above it all; I am alone with the stars.

Thomas Carlyle.

EXPOSITORY AND ARGUMENTATIVE

GROUP

HAMLET'S ADVICE TO THE PLAYERS

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue :

but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, perwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it outherods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make