nate than the influence they impute to the stage, and the
quantity of anxious investigation they devote to its concerns.

With us, the question about the moral tendency of theatrical
amusements is now very generally consigned to the meditation of
debating clubs, and speculative societies of young men under age; with
our neighbours it is a weighty subject of inquiry for minds of almost
the highest order. With us, the stage is considered as a harmless
pastime, wholesome because it occupies the man by occupying his
mental, not his sensual faculties; one of the many departments of
fictitious representation; perhaps the most exciting, but also the
most transitory; sometimes hurtful, generally beneficial, just as the
rest are; entitled to no peculiar regard, and far inferior in its
effect to many others which have no special apparatus for their
application. The Germans, on the contrary, talk of it as of some new
organ for refining the hearts and minds of men; a sort of lay pulpit,
the worthy ally of the sacred one, and perhaps even better fitted to
exalt some of our nobler feelings; because its objects are much more
varied, and because it speaks to us through many avenues, addressing
the eye by its pomp and decorations, the ear by its harmonies, and the
heart and imagination by its poetical embellishments, and heroic acts
and sentiments. Influences still more mysterious are hinted at, if not
directly announced. An idea seems to lurk obscurely at the bottom of
certain of their abstruse and elaborate speculations, as if the stage
were destined to replace some of those sublime illusions which the
progress of reason is fast driving from the earth; as if its
pageantry, and allegories, and figurative shadowing-forth of things,
might supply men's nature with much of that quickening nourishment
which we once derived from the superstitions and mythologies of darker
ages. Viewing the matter in this light, they proceed in the management
of it with all due earnestness. Hence their minute and painful
investigations of the origin of dramatic emotion, of its various kinds
and degrees; their subdivisions of romantic and heroic and
romantico-heroic, and the other endless jargon that encumbers their
critical writings. The zeal of the people corresponds with that of
their instructors. The want of more important public interests
naturally contributes still farther to the prominence of this, the
discussion of which is not forbidden, or sure to be