s not in the
least altered. In representation it is all--in the closet nothing. This
arises from the conduct of the plot, which indeed constitutes the whole
of its merit. In Europe, as in America, the judgment of every critic is
at variance with the decision of the multitude upon it, for while at the
Lyceum it has been applauded by "the million," it has been lashed by the
judicious, in various respectable publications.

The time has been, nor has it long passed by, when that body in the
community who decided the fate of every literary performance, far from
being contented with EFFECT upon the stage, condemned it, if it were not
produced by an adequate CAUSE in nature. To that body the Farrago of
Melodrame, written spectacle, and mysterious agency, would have been
objects of ridicule or disapprobation, and the just influence of their
opinions upon the public would have driven back the German muse with all
her paraphernalia of tempests, castles, dungeons, and murderers, to rave
on her native ground: except in their proper place (farce or pantomime)
they would not have been tolerated. To write only to the passions, to
expose human beings to circumstances that cannot in the natural course
of life occur, and release them by means which outrage all probability,
and to those ends to urge vice and virtue beyond all possible bounds,
and fabricate extreme characters such as have rarely or never existed,
characters either better than saints, or worse than devils, for the mere
purpose of producing horror and astonishment, and hanging up the
feelings of the multitude on the tenterhooks of fearful suspense and
painful apprehension--to violate all the rules prescribed by nature and
experience, and place heroes and heroines in situations so far out of
the course of human conduct, that the poet cannot get them out again by
rational, feasible means, but is compelled to leave their fate to the
guess of the spectators by picturesque grouping and dropping the
curtain. What is this but to reverse the very nature of the drama,
"Whose end," says its father Shakspeare, "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."

By such miserable expedients as these, the fascinating effects of the
Foundling of the Forest are produced. But in the management of those
materials, the author has displayed unparal