...hitherto assumed no distinct shape," but that "when the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and...a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood." Every artist who has the sense of the sublime knows that the pure genius is essentially silent, and...

...juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and...brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh andyblood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance. How cruelly this operates...

...allows us to imagine any Hamlet we like; for he says (p. 222) that in seeing a Shakespearian play, "We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance." Other paradoxes will appear to the reader. "The truth is," to use a phrase of Lamb's since widely employed...

...the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realising an idea, we have only materialised and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood." If that is true of Shakespeare, the greatest of dramatic poets, how far is it from the impression which...

...Representation' by which he meant their unfitness: When the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and...a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. ... It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakspeare are less...

...juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and...go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance" (i:98). This unquestionably is another way of describing the hollow ancestry and dissipated capital...

...Lamb's complaint that theatrical performance limits the imaginative scope of Shakespeare's poetry: "How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have...pressed down to the measure of a straitlacing actuality. . . ." While the complaint may have been prompted by the scenic excesses of nineteenth-century productions,...

...being exposed to a large assembly." Actors only reduced Shakespeare's "fine vision" to the mundane standard of flesh and blood: "We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance." Shakespeare's plays, Lamb insisted, were suited neither for performance on a stage nor for exposure...

...political concern. (15) Thus, while Charles Lamb would bemoan that the Gothic stage has "materialised and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood" (Poems 222; also quoted in Richardson, Mental 2-3), playwrights like Byron and Shelley would see as...

...afterwards for this juvenile pleasure. When the novelty is past, we find to our cost that, instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and...go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance" ("On the Tragedies of Shakspeare"). 55. Joseph Warton, Adventurer, no. 97 (9 October 1753). Warton...