ideas. These performances
were first given in honor of the god of wine, Bacchus, which accounts,
I suppose, for the fact that a theatre cannot live without a bar. On
certain festive days, they acted these plays often in the most indecent
manner, with drunkenness and debauchery abounding--scenes which are
re-enacted in theatres at the present day. Now, they have a more
splendid stage, within a costly, spacious building, but there is little
or no improvement in the purity of the play and its incidentals. It is
just as demoralizing now as it was then, and has been so in every age of
the world. For that reason, such exhibitions have been suppressed, at
times, in some countries, and this was the case, at one period, in our
own land."

Mr. Bryant was followed by a gentleman on the other side of the subject,
but, for a reason that will be obvious to the reader before he gets
through the chapter, we shall not report the arguments in the negative.

Another speaker said "that the characters of the actors were loose,
exceedingly so; and if the audience could learn something of human
nature there, it was only the debasing side of it. It is generally true
that actors lend their influence to intemperance, licentiousness, and
irreligion. They do not patronize Sabbath schools, churches, and other
Christian institutions, but they patronize bars, gambling saloons, and
houses of ill-fame. Many of those men even who go to the theatre, would
be quite unwilling to introduce actors to the society of their sons and
daughters. They are so well convinced that this class are corrupt and
unprincipled, that they would exclude them from the fireside."

Another speaker, in the affirmative, said: "As a general thing, dramatic
literature is immoral and debasing. I admit that the tragedies of
Shakspeare are a pattern of classic elegance and dignity, yet there are
passages even in his works that never should be read or spoken in the
hearing of others. In them vice is often stripped of its deformity,
while virtue is made to appear to disadvantage. The youth who witnesses
a play where vice is made to appear as an indiscretion rather than a
sin, is likely to think less of virtue, and more favorably of vice. An
English scholar has taken pains to read all the plays of the stage of
England, and mark all the profane or indecent passages unfit to be read
or spoken in a public assembly, and he has found _seven thousand_.
During the reign of King James the First