revail over that of the people, and in preventing
themselves from being carried away by the latter. The pit has frequently
made laws for the boxes.

If it be difficult for an aristocracy to prevent the people from getting
the upper hand in the theatre, it will readily be understood that the
people will be supreme there when democratic principles have crept into
the laws and manners--when ranks are intermixed--when minds, as well as
fortunes, are brought more nearly together--and when the upper class
has lost, with its hereditary wealth, its power, its precedents, and its
leisure. The tastes and propensities natural to democratic nations, in
respect to literature, will therefore first be discernible in the drama,
and it may be foreseen that they will break out there with vehemence. In
written productions, the literary canons of aristocracy will be gently,
gradually, and, so to speak, legally modified; at the theatre they
will be riotously overthrown. The drama brings out most of the
good qualities, and almost all the defects, inherent in democratic
literature. Democratic peoples hold erudition very cheap, and care but
little for what occurred at Rome and Athens; they want to hear something
which concerns themselves, and the delineation of the present age is
what they demand.

When the heroes and the manners of antiquity are frequently brought
upon the stage, and dramatic authors faithfully observe the rules of
antiquated precedent, that is enough to warrant a conclusion that the
democratic classes have not yet got the upper hand of the theatres.
Racine makes a very humble apology in the preface to the "Britannicus"
for having disposed of Junia amongst the Vestals, who, according to
Aulus Gellius, he says, "admitted no one below six years of age nor
above ten." We may be sure that he would neither have accused himself
of the offence, nor defended himself from censure, if he had written for
our contemporaries. A fact of this kind not only illustrates the state
of literature at the time when it occurred, but also that of society
itself. A democratic stage does not prove that the nation is in a state
of democracy, for, as we have just seen, even in aristocracies it may
happen that democratic tastes affect the drama; but when the spirit
of aristocracy reigns exclusively on the stage, the fact irrefragably
demonstrates that the whole of society is aristocratic; and it may be
boldly inferred that the same lettered and learned