Читать книгу The Essays of Douglas Jerrold онлайн

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ssss1.The Mulberry-tree was cut down; and the race of Gastrels is not extinct.

The cry that the Chinese are not yet fit for Shakespeare—a cry raised in the same acute spirit in which people in chains have been said not to be fit for freedom—can, we think, have no bad effect on even moderately liberal men, after the production of papers now beneath our hands. All we ask of the Foreign Minister is a company, to act either on board Chinese junks or on shore, as the intellectual wants of his Majesty may require; nay, if under the direction of their own stage-manager, to exhibit themselves at any distance in the interior. The company to be paid and clothed by the government for whose benefit they act, with this condition, that they be subject to the laws and customs of the Chinese, obediently shaving their eyebrows and letting their tails grow. For the passing difficulty of the language, that, we have no doubt, will soon be overcome; many of the actors, we religiously believe it, speaking and playing equally well in English or in Chinese. We now come to the proofs of the fit condition of the people for Shakespeare—for that which they will “hail as a boon,” and which we shall part with as a drug.