personify doctrines in diametrical and studied opposition to poverty of spirit, to purity, to meekness, forbearance, and forgiveness. Doctrines, not simply expressed, as those of the Sunday are, in the naked form of axioms, principles, and precepts, but realized, embodied, made alive, furnished with organs, clothed, decorated, brought into lively discourse, into interesting action; enforced with all the energy of passion, adorned with all the graces of language, and exhibited with every aid of emphatical delivery, every attraction of appropriate gesture. To such a complicated temptation is it wise, voluntarily, studiously, unnecessarily, to expose frail and erring creatures ? Is not the conflict too severe ? Is not the competition too unequal? It is pleaded by the advocates for church music, that the organ and its vocal accompaniments assist devotion, by enlisting the senses on the side of religion; and it is justly pleaded as an argument in favour of both, because the affections may fairly and properly derive every honest aid from any thing which helps to draw them off from the world to God. But is it not equally true, that the same species of assistance, in a wrong direction, will produce an equally forcible effect in its way, and at least equally contribute in drawing off the soul from God to the world? I do not presume to say that the injury will be inevitable, much less that it will be irretrievable; but I dare repeat, that it is exposing feeble virtue to a powerful temptation; and to a hazard so great, that were the same reason applied to any worldly subject, it would be thought a folly to venture on any undertaking where the chances against our coming off unhurt were so obviously against us. Besides, if we may pursue the doctrine of chances a little farther, that is at best playing a most unprofitable game, where, if we even could be sure that nothing would be lost, it is clear to demonstation that nothing can be gained; so that the certain risk is not even counbalanced by the possible success. It is not in point to the present design to allude to the multitude of theatrical sentiments which seem to be written as if in avowed opposition to such precepts as "Swear not at all:" "He that looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery in his heart," &c. &c. We are willing to allow that this last offence, at least, is generally, I would it were invariably, confined to those more incorrect dramas which we do not now profess to consider. Yet it is to be feared we should not find many pieces (are we sure we can find one?) entirely exempt from the first heavy charge. And it is perhaps one of the most invincible objections to many tragedies, otherwise not very exceptionable, that the awful and tremendous name of the infinitely glorious God is shamefully, and almost incessantly, introduced in various scenes, both in the way of asseveration and of invocation. Besides, the term good and bad play are relative; for we are so little exact in our general definitions, that the character given to the piece often takes its colour from the character of him who gives it. Passages which to the decent moral man, (him I mean who is decent and moral on mere worldly principles,) are to the "purged eye" of a Christian disgusting by their vanity, and offensive by their levity, to speak in the gentlest terms. But more especially the prime animating spirit of many of our more decorous dramas seems to furnish a strong contrast to the improved and enlarged comment of our Saviour in the New Testament, on the Divine prohibition against murder in the Old, in the woe denounced against anger, as containing in itself the seed and principle of murder; anger, and its too usual concomitant, revenge, being the main spring on which some of our best tragedies turns. The eloquent apologies, and the elaborate vindication of the crimes resulting from the point of honour and the dread of shame, and with such apologies and vindications some of our most approved pieces abound, too temptingly invite the high unbroken spirit of a warm youth, from admiring such sentiments to adopt them; and he is liable to be stimulated first to the commission of the crime, and, after he has committed it, to the hope of having his reputation cleared, by the perpetual eulogies these flattering scenes bestow on rash and intemperate bravery; on the dignity of that spirit which cannot brook an insult; and on that generous sense of wounded honour which is ever on the watch to revenge itself. And when he hears the bursts of applause with which these sallies of resentment, these vows of revenge, these determinations to destroy or be destroyed, this solemn obtesting the great Judge of hearts to witness the innocence of perhaps a very criminal action or intention ;-when, I say, a hot-headed young man witnesses the enthusiasm of admiration which such expressions excite in a transported audience, will it not operate as a kind of stimulus to him to adopt a similar conduct, should he ever be placed in similar circumstances? and will it not furnish him with a sort of criterion how such maxims would be received, and such conduct approved, in real life? For the danger does not lie merely in his hearing such sentiments delivered from the stage, but also in seeing how favourably they are received by the audience; received, too, by those persons who, should he realize these sentiments, would probably be the arbiters of his conduct. These are to him a kind of anticipated jury. The scene is as it were the rehearsal of an acquittal at the bar of that world whose tribunal is perhaps, unhappily for him, considered as his last appeal; for it is not probably hazarding too much to conclude, that by the sort of character we are considering, human opinion will be looked upon as the highest motive of action, human praise as the highest reward, and human censure as an evil to be deprecated, even by the loss of his soul. If one of the most virtuous of poets and of men, by the cool, deliberate, argumentative manner in which he makes his Roman hero destroy himself; this hero too a pagan, consistently illustrating by this action an historical fact, and acting in a natural conformity to his own stoical principles ;-if, I say, under all these palliating circumstances, the ingenious sophistry by which the poet was driven to mitigate the crime of suicide, in order to accommodate the sentiment to the real character of his hero; -if this Christian poet, even to his own private friend and literary associate, could appear, by the specious reasoning of his famous soliloquy, to vindicate self-murder, so that the unhappy Budgell exclaimed, when falling by his own hand, What Cato did, and Addison approv'd, If, I say, under all the extenuating circumstances here detailed, such a dreadful effect could be produced from a cause so little expected or intended by its author to produce it, how much more probably are similar ill consequences likely to arise from similar causes in the hands of a poet less guarded and worse principled; and whose heroes have perhaps neither the apology of acknowledged paganism, nor the sanction of historic truth? For Addison, who in general has made his piece a vehicle of the noblest and most patriotic sentiments, could not avoid making his catastrophe just what he has made it, without violating a notorious fact, and falsifying the character he exhibits. Even in those plays in which the principles which false honour teaches are neither professedly inculcated nor vindicated; nay, where moreover the practices above alluded to, and especially the practice of duelling, are even reprobated in the progress of the piece; yet the hero who has been reprieved from sin during four acts by the sage remonstrance of some interfering friend, or the imperious power of beauty; beauty, which is to a stage hero that restraining or impelling power which law, or conscience, or scripture, are to other men; still, in the conclusion, when the intrigue is dexterously completed, when the passion is worked up to its acmé, and the valedictory scene is so near at hand that it becomes inconvenient to the poet that the impetuosity of his hero should be any longer restrained; when his own patience and the expostulating powers of his friend are both exhausted together, and he seasonably winds up the drama by stabbing either his worst enemy or his best benefactor, or, as it still more frequently happens, himself; still, notwithstanding his criminal catastrophe, the hero has been exhibited through all the preceding scenes as such a combination of perfections; his behaviour has been so brave and so generous, (and bravery and generosity are two qualities which the world boldly stakes against both tables of the decalogue,) that the youthful spectator, especially if he have that, amiable warmth and sensibility of soul which lay him so peculiarly open to seduction, is too much tempted to consider as venial the sudden and unpremeditated crime to which the unresisted impulse of the moment may have driven so accomplished a character. And a little tame tag of morality, set to a few musical periods by the unimpassioned friend, |