In other
words, I have put his thoughts into language; and this I conceive to
be the purpose of the soliloquy upon the stage as well as in the
closet, being at once the most natural, and perhaps the only way of
communicating to the spectator what is supposed to be passing in the
bosom of the scenic personage. There are no such soliloquies in
nature, it is true, but unless they were received as a conventional
medium of communication betwixt the poet and the audience, we should
reduce dramatic authors to the recipe of Master Puff, who makes Lord
Burleigh intimate a long train of political reasoning to the audience,
by one comprehensive shake of his noddle. In narrative, no doubt, the
writer has the alternative of telling that his personages thought so
and so, inferred thus and thus, and arrived at such and such a
conclusion; but the soliloquy is a more concise and spirited mode of
communicating the same information; and therefore thus communed, or
thus might have communed, the Lord of Glenvarloch with his own mind.
"She is right, and has taught me a lesson I will profit by. I have
been, through my whole life, one who leant upon others for that
assistance, which it is more truly noble to derive from my own
exertions. I am ashamed of feeling the paltry inconvenience which long
habit had led me to annex to the want of a servant's assistance--I am
ashamed of that; but far, far more am I ashamed to have suffered the
same habit of throwing my own burden on others, to render me, since I
came to this city, a mere victim of those events, which I have never
even attempted to influence--a thing never acting, but perpetually
acted upon--protected by one friend, deceived by another; but in the
advantage which I received from the one, and the evil I have sustained
from the other, as passive and helpless as a boat that drifts without
oar or rudder at the mercy of the winds and waves.
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