ening with another, you may find support
for an enthusiastic theory of stage morality and the high tone of
audiences in most theatres in the country; and if you fancy that it
is least so in the theatres frequented by the poor you make a great
mistake, for in none is the appreciation of good moral fare more
marked than in these.

In reference to the poorer classes, we all lament the wide prevalence
of intemperate drinking. Well, is it not an obvious reflection that
the worst performance seen on any of our stages cannot be so bad as
drinking for a corresponding time in a gin-palace? I have pointed this
contrast before, and I point it again. The drinking we deplore takes
place in company--bad company; it is enlivened by talk--bad talk. It
is relished by obscenity. Where drink and low people come together
these things must be. The worst that can come of stage pandering to
the corrupt tastes of its basest patrons cannot be anything like this,
and, as a rule, the stage holds out long against the invitation to
pander; and such invitations, from the publicity and decorum that
attend the whole matter, are neither frequent nor eager. A sort of
decency sets in upon the coarsest person in entering even the roughest
theatre. I have sometimes thought that, considering the liability to
descend and the facility of descent, a special Providence watches
over the morals and tone of our English stage. I do not desire to
overcharge the eulogy. There never was a time when the stage had not
conspicuous faults. There never was a time when these were not freely
admitted by those most concerned for the maintenance of the stage
at its best. In Shakespeare, whenever the subject of the theatre is
approached, we perceive signs that that great spirit, though it had
a practical and business-like vein, and essayed no impossible
enterprises, groaned under the necessities, or the demands of a
public which desired frivolities and deformities which jarred upon the
poet-manager's feelings. As we descend the course of time we find that
each generation looked back to a supposed previous period when taste
ranged higher, and when the inferior and offensive peculiarities of
the existing stage were unknown. Yet from most of these generations
we inherit works as well as traditions and biographical recollections
which the world will never let die. The truth is that the immortal
part of the stage is its nobler part. Ignoble accidents and interludes
come and go, but