ke a felon from the
dungeons, and, like the felon, to feel a stigma in every morsel which it
puts between its lips. It must stoop to French frivolity, or German
extravagance, and be glad to exist upon either. Yet, why should not
higher names come to its aid? Why should not the State relieve the
difficulties of a great institution, which might be made to repay its
assistance a thousand-fold? Is there nothing that could be withdrawn
from the waste of our civil lists, or the pomp of public establishments,
to reunite, to purify, and even to exalt the stage? The people _will_
have theatres. Good or evil, noble or degraded, the stage will be
demanded by the people. Is it a thing indifferent to our rulers, to
supply them with this powerful and universal excitement in its highest
degree of moral influence, or in its lowest degree of impurity; to bring
before them, with all the attractions of the drama, the memory of heroes
and sages, patriots and martyrs, or leave them to rake for the
indulgence of eye and ear in the very kennels of crime?

"They order those things better in France."

Unquestionably. The care of Government there protects the national
taste, and prevents the theatres from looking for subsistence to the
history of the highway. The vices which now haunt theatres are no more
necessary to their nature, than to the senate or the palace. Why should
not the State interpose to prevent the sale of poison on the stage, as
in the streets? Why should it not offer prizes and honours for great
tragedies and comedies, as soon as it would for a voyage to the Arctic
or Antarctic? But is dramatic genius dead in England? What, in England!
where nothing dies--where every faculty of the heart and understanding
is in the most perpetual activity--where the noblest impulses are
perpetually pushing forward to the noblest ends--where human nature
moves in all its vigour, from hour to hour, without disguise--where the
whole anatomy of the moral frame is visible, and all its weakness, and
all its wonders, are the daily spectacle of all mankind!

In giving these opinions of the powers of the stage, need I guard them
by saying, that I contemplate a higher spirit than the drama even of
Shakspeare has ever displayed--one which, to the vigour of his
characters, and the splendours of his poetry, should add a moral of
which his time was scarcely conscious? My idea would approach more
nearly the objects of the great Greek dramas, in which the fi