e we learn to
account for, and--relatively to the author--perceive the necessity of, the
Fool or Clown or both, as the substitutes of the Vice and the Devil, which
our ancestors had been so accustomed to see in every exhibition of the
stage, that they could not feel any performance perfect without them. Even
to this day in Italy, every opera--(even Metastasio obeyed the claim
throughout)--must have six characters, generally two pairs of cross lovers,
a tyrant and a confidant, or a father and two confidants, themselves
lovers;--and when a new opera appears, it is the universal fashion to
ask--which is the tyrant, which the lover? &c.

It is the especial honour of Christianity, that in its worst and most
corrupted form it cannot wholly separate itself from morality;--whereas the
other religions in their best form (I do not include Mohammedanism, which
is only an anomalous corruption of Christianity, like Swedenborgianism)
have no connection with it. The very impersonation of moral evil under the
name of Vice, facilitated all other impersonations; and hence we see that
the Mysteries were succeeded by Moralities, or dialogues and plots of
allegorical personages. Again, some character in real history had become
so famous, so proverbial, as Nero for instance, that they were introduced
instead of the moral quality, for which they were so noted;--and in this
manner the stage was moving on to the absolute production of heroic and
comic real characters, when the restoration of literature, followed by the
ever-blessed Reformation, let in upon the kingdom not only new knowledge,
but new motive. A useful rivalry commenced between the metropolis on the
one hand,--the residence, independently of the court and nobles, of the
most active and stirring spirits who had not been regularly educated, or
who, from mischance or otherwise, had forsaken the beaten track of
preferment,--and the universities on the other. The latter prided
themselves on their closer approximation to the ancient rules and ancient
regularity--taking the theatre of Greece, or rather its dim reflection, the
rhetorical tragedies of the poet Seneca, as a perfect ideal, without any
critical collation of the times, origin, or circumstances;--whilst, in the
mean time, the popular writers, who could not and would not abandon what
they had found to delight their countrymen sincerely, and not merely from
inquiries first put to the recollection of rules, and answered in the
affi