sence; where virtue and vice, happiness and misery, folly and wisdom, pass before men in a thousand true and easily-understood pictures; where Providence solves her riddles, and loosens her knots before their eyes; where the human heart, under the torture of passion, confesses its deepest and most secret emotions; where all masks fall, all illusions vanish; and Truth, incorruptible as Rhadamanthus, sits as judge!

The jurisdiction of the stage begins where the limits of worldly laws end. When justice is blinded by gold, and luxuriates in the pay of vice; when the crimes of the powerful laugh at her weakness; and when fear of man ties the arm of the judge; then the Stage takes up the sword and balance, and forces vice before her awful tribunal. The entire field of imagination and history, the past and the future, are ready at her command. Bold criminals, who have been mouldering for centuries in their dust, are summoned by the mighty appeal of poetry, and react their horrible career, as examples for trembling posterity. Powerless as the shadows in a phantasmagora, the terrors of their era pass before our eyes, and with a voluptuous trembling we curse their memory! Though morality should be no more taught; though Religion should no longer find believers; though laws should cease to exist, yet still we should shudder on beholding Medea descending the palacesteps after her horrid infanticide. Virtuous terror will seize humanity, and in silence will every man praise his good conscience, when the sleepless Lady Macbeth washes her hands, and calls for all the perfumes of Araby to destroy the damning smell of murder! As sure as visible representation works more effectually than the dead letter and cold history, so surely does the Stage work deeper and more lastingly than morality or the laws.

But in all this she only assists the worldly jurisdiction: a larger field is open to her; a thousand crimes which the laws leave unpunished, she punishes; a thousand virtues on which they are silent, are recommended by her. It is the Stage that accompanies virtue and religion; from their pure source she takes her precepts and examples, and dresses severe duty in a charming and alluring garment. With what heavenly feelings, resolutions and passions she fills our souls; what divine ideals she places before us for our imitation! When Augustus, great as his gods, extends his hands to the traitor who already reads his death-sentence on his lips; when he exclaims 'Let us be friends, Cinna!' who in the crowd would not willingly press the hand of his greatest enemy, to imitate the noble Roman? When Franz of Sichengen, on his way to punish a prince and fight for others' rights, looks back and sees his castle, where he has just left his helpless wife and child, in flames, but still marches on to keep his plighted word, how great then appears man! - how despicable the so-much-feared and invincible fate!

The Stage shows vice in her terrible mirror as hideous as she shows virtue attractive. When the helpless and childish Lear, with his hoary locks streaming in the wind, knocks at the door of his daughter, and tells the raging elements how unnatural his Regan has been; when his bursting heart at last finds vent in the words, I gave you all!' how awful appears to us ingratitude; how fervently do we promise filial love and obedience!

But the field of action for the Stage extends still farther. Even where Religion and the laws deem it beneath their dignity to follow the feelings of man, she is still busy for our education. The welfare of society is destroyed as often by folly as by crime and vice. Experience, old as the world, teaches us, that in the machinery of human life, the heaviest weights often hang on the smallest and most delicate threads; and when we retrace actions to their source, we smile ten times before we are horrified once. Our register of criminals becomes smaller every day we grow older, and that of fools every day larger. We know but one secret to prevent mankind from degenerating, and that is, to shield their hearts against weakness.

Much of this effect we may expect from the Stage. She it is who holds the mirror up to the numerous class of fools, and chides their thousand follies with salutary mockery. That which she has produced by exciting our feelings and terror, she now effects, perhaps quicker, by laughter and satire. Were we to estimate comedy and tragedy according to the measure of the effect produced by each, experience would probably give the preference to the first. Scorn and contempt wound the pride of man more than horror tortures his conscience. Our cowardice hides itself before the horrible, but it is even this very cowardice which hands us over to the sting of satire. We may perhaps suffer a friend to attack our motives, but it will cost us dear to forgive the laugh at our expense. Our crimes may permit a judge, rather than our weakness a witness. The Stage alone may with impunity ridicule our weaknesses, for the reason that she spares our vanity, and does not name the guilty one. We see our own caricature in her mirror, without blushing, and in silence thank her for the soft correction.

But her entire field of action is yet by no means ended. The Stage, more than any other school of the state, is a school of practical wisdom. An unerring key to the most secret recesses of the human soul. We grant that vanity and a hardened conscience often destroy her best effects; that a thousand crimes look boldly into her mirror; a thousand good sentiments rebound fruitlessly from the cold heart of the spectator. Molière's Harpagon may not have cured one miser; few gamesters may have been withheld from their destructive passion by the suicide of Beverly; the unhappy robber, Charles Moor, may not have rendered the public highways more safe; but if we limit the great effects produced by the Stage, if we are even so unjust as to deny them altogether, how immense still remains her influence! If she does not succeed in destroying or diminishing crime, she at least makes us acquainted with it. With such as commit it, we are obliged to live; we must avoid or meet them; defeat or be defeated by them; but they cannot surprise us; we are prepared against their schemes.

The Stage betrays to us the secret how to discover and how to render them harmless. She tears the mask from the hypocrite, and shows the net with which intrigue and cunning envelopes us. She drags deceit and falsehood from their labyrinthic hiding places, and exhibits their hateful faces to the world. Perhaps not one rouè is terrified by the fate of the dying Sara: all pictures of punished seduction may not correct him; nay, the cunning actress may herself be desirous of preventing