der the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom. Some tears might be
drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage. I should
be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial, theatric sense
of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in real life. With
such a perverted mind, I could never venture to show my face at a
tragedy. People would think the tears that Garrick formerly, or that
Siddons not long since, have extorted from me, were the tears of
hypocrisy; I should know them to be the tears of folly.

Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than churches
where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged. Poets, who have to
deal with an audience not yet graduated in the school of the rights of
men, and who must apply themselves to the moral constitution of the
heart, would not dare to produce such a triumph as a matter of
exultation. There, where men follow their natural impulses, they would
not bear the odious maxims of a Machiavellian policy, whether applied
to the attainment of monarchical or democratic tyranny. They would
reject them on the modern, as they once did on the ancient stage, where
they could not bear even the hypothetical proposition of such wickedness
in the mouth of a personated tyrant, though suitable to the character he
sustained. No theatric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne
in the midst of the real tragedy of this triumphal day: a principal
actor weighing, as it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors, so much
actual crime against so much contingent advantage, and after putting in
and out weights, declaring that the balance was on the side of the
advantages. They would not bear to see the crimes of new democracy
posted as in a ledger against the crimes of old despotism, and the
book-keepers of politics finding democracy still in debt, but by no
means unable or unwilling to pay the balance. In the theatre, the first
intuitive glance, without any elaborate process of reasoning, will show
that this method of political computation would justify every extent of
crime. They would see that on these principles, even where the very
worst acts were not perpetrated, it was owing rather to the fortune of
the conspirators than to their parsimony in the expenditure of treachery
and blood. They would soon see that criminal means, once tolerated, are
soon preferred. They present a shorter cut to the object than through
the highway of the moral virtues.