uce this separate attention? The people laughed heartily, no doubt.
Nor can I conceive any meaning attached to the words "separate attention,"
that is not fully answered by one part of an exhibition exciting
seriousness or pity, and the other raising mirth and loud laughter. That
they felt no impiety in the affair is most true. For it is the very
essence of that system of Christian polytheism, which in all its
essentials is now fully as gross in Spain, in Sicily, and the South of
Italy, as it ever was in England in the days of Henry VI. (nay, more so,
for a Wicliffe had not then appeared only, but scattered the good seed
widely),--it is an essential part, I say, of that system to draw the mind
wholly from its own inward whispers and quiet discriminations, and to
habituate the conscience to pronounce sentence in every case according to
the established verdicts of the church and the casuists. I have looked
through volume after volume of the most approved casuists,--and still I
find disquisitions whether this or that act is right, and under what
circumstances, to a minuteness that makes reasoning ridiculous, and of a
callous and unnatural immodesty, to which none but a monk could harden
himself, who has been stripped of all the tender charities of life, yet is
goaded on to make war against them by the unsubdued hauntings of our
meaner nature, even as dogs are said to get the _hydrophobia_ from
excessive thirst. I fully believe that our ancestors laughed as heartily,
as their posterity do at Grimaldi;--and not having been told that they
would be punished for laughing, they thought it very innocent;--and if
their priests had left out murder in the catalogue of their prohibitions
(as indeed they did under certain circumstances of heresy), the greater
part of them,--the moral instincts common to all men having been smothered
and kept from development,--would have thought as little of murder.

However this may be, the necessity of at once instructing and gratifying
the people produced the great distinction between the Greek and the
English theatres;--for to this we must attribute the origin of
tragi-comedy, or a representation of human events more lively, nearer the
truth, and permitting a larger field of moral instruction, a more ample
exhibition of the recesses of the human heart, under all the trials and
circumstances that most concern us, than was known or guessed at by
AEschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides;--and at the same tim