ies, despotism, and tyranny. The best historical facts are
sorrowfully abandoned by a patriotic author, who he is prevented from
instructing his country fellows, under a monarchy: and many, who did write
tragedies, or comedies under despotism with their free genius, suffered
the vigilance of the iron rule. Shakspeare himself, was under the
vigilance of the despotic Elizabeth: and although the present government
of England is now the best of Europe, the english subject does not, and
had never understood the republican feeling of Sparta, Athens, or Rome.
England had never had a republic: and the writer for a theatre must be a
republican in his soul, and in the centre of a happy republic. He who is
afraid of being chained in a dungeon, cannot tell to an unfortunate people
all the evils of a monarchy with which a king sucks the people's blood;
and the theatre must needs be the palladium of truth, and people's rights.

It is a fact; America is a republic, and I hope, she will sustain herself
as a republic with the improvements of the age. But, the greater number of
the americans are from english blood, which, though brave, firm, and
constant, has not yet felt that glowing, thrilling existence which
inflamed those hearts of Sparta, Athens, and Rome with that heavenly flame
of Prometheus. And the son cannot feel in his blood, that which the father
did never feel himself. The republics of those times were nobility, and
grandeur of thought; the republics of ours are but calculation, money, and
selfishness.

By degrees, education purifies our blood, and brings the human heart to
feel what our ancestors did not feel themselves. But, before a nation will
be able to reach the true, virtuous enthusiasm of a republic in which man
feels himself as being a part of heaven, it seems, we are still doomed to
pass in obscurity ages, and ages! The republican, worthy of our race, I
mean, of all men throughout the world, must not think for himself. His
country should think for him. His God, body, and soul is his country: and
to die for her, is his greatest reward. A republic is a beneficient
mother, who does not leave in want her best generous children: and virtue
with these is wealth, and prosperity.

A writer of comedies, or tragedies under a monarchial government, writes
only to please his princes; and the people, present in that theatre,
swallow from the mouth of subject actors, nothing but their shame. It
should be better that such a peop