the opinion of its enemies, nor with the
least desire to increase the admiration of its friends; but to awaken
public opinion to a sense of its vast importance, and of the advantages
which society may derive from giving full and salutary effect to its
agency, by generous encouragement, and vigilant control--by directing
its operations into proper channels, and fostering it by approbation in
every thing that has a tendency to promote virtue, to improve the
intellectual powers, and to correct and refine the taste, and the
manners of society. This desirable end can only be attained by making it
respectable, and sheltering its professors from the insult and
oppression of the ignorant, the base-minded, and the illiberal. None
will profit by the precepts of those whom they contemn; and the youth of
the country will be very unlikely to yield to the authority of the
instructor whom they see subjected to the sneers and affronts of the
very rabble they themselves despise. Besides, if actors were to be
treated with injustice and contumely, young gentlemen of talents and
virtue would be deterred from entering into the profession; and the
stage would soon become as bad as it is falsely described to be by
fanatics--a sink of vice and corruption: but the wisdom and liberality
of the British nation, after the example of old Rome, having, on the
contrary, given to the gentlemen of the stage their merited rank in
society, and raised actors and actresses of irreproachable private
character, to associate with the families of peers, statesmen,
legislators, and men of the highest rank in the nation, the profession
is filled with persons eminently respectable for talents, learning and
morals, and estimable as those of other classes in social
life--estimable as husbands, fathers, children, friends and companions.
But in Great Britain, they have a twofold protection--that of the
audience and that of the law--from the insults and injustice of
capricious, saucy, or malignant individuals. There, the line that
separates the rights of the actor from those of the auditor has been
exactly defined by the highest judicial authority.[4] And if an
individual assaults a performer by hissing[5] without carrying the
audience, or a large majority of it, along with him, the performer has
his action against his malicious assailant, and is adjudged damages as
certainly as persons of any of the other professions or trades recover
for an assault, a calumny, or a l