us, as
may serve to extenuate the criminality of those acts, and to show that
his misconduct was the natural, or rather the necessary and inevitable
result of the circumstances to which he was exposed, and nothing more
than the every-day issues of human infirmity. If in discharging the
office of a biographer, and canvassing the character of the dead, we are
compelled to utter truths that will be unwelcome to many a heart, and to
speak lightly of the bad members of a profession for the good ones of
which we have a high respect, let it be remembered that we do it perhaps
reluctantly, but certainly in obedience to the imperious commands of a
duty paramount to all form and ceremony, which dictates that truth must
be investigated, no matter what galled jade may feel its withers wrung
by it.

The indiscriminating, unjust, and illiberal spirit of persecution, with
which actors have been followed up for ages, has not a greater enemy in
any bosom upon earth than in ours; and we should not only libel the
opinions we have uniformly avowed, but violate our conscientious
persuasion, and suppress truth if we neglected to state that a multitude
of the ladies and gentlemen of that profession, justly stand as high in
moral character, as any of those who, in the other departments of life,
are most conspicuous for virtue and nice honour. The time was, indeed,
when instances of the kind were so very rare, that they were scarcely
credited, and when the general maxim was, that the public had nothing to
do with the private lives of performers. But now, when the spotless
purity of successive actresses in England has so far diminished the
prejudice entertained against the body, that actresses of irreproachable
character are received into good company, and many of them even married
into high families, a correspondent ambition on their part fills most
ladies of the stage with an honourable spirit of emulation in the race
of fame; while, on the other hand, the people exercise a very rigid
scrutiny upon the stage, hold the actresses amenable for their private
conduct, and declare that they will not suffer one who is notoriously
vitious to come forward on the stage and make a mockery of discretion by
uttering the precepts of virtue.

Still, however, there hang about the stage in every country too many
actresses of abandoned character. As may well be supposed, the private
attachments of those are as perfectly feigned, as any of the passions or
char