Did scholars and sages predominate in the audience? On the contrary, if we may credit cotemporary writers, it was the Theatre that was the academy, and that gradually refined and improved the audience.* Much stress is laid on royal patronage, but it was no courtly wand that raised in one year three theatres: it was no sovereign's mandate that cleared the Bear gardens, and attracted its frequenters to more refined and liberal entertainments. It is true that plays were some

* In his Apology for Players, Heywood, with some plausibility, ascribes to the influence of the stage, the diffusion of information and the improvement of taste,

You see to what excellence our refined English-is brought, that in these days we are ashamed of that Euphemy and eloquence, which within these 60 years, the best tongues in the land were proud to pronounce. Plays have made the ignorant more apprehensive, taught the unlearned knowledge of many famous histories; instructed such as cannot read, in the discovery of all our English chronicles. What man have you now who cannot discourse of any notable thing recorded even from William the Conqueror, nay from the landing of Bruit, until this day?"

times performed at court, but what royal personage ever deigned to visit even the Rose or the Fortune, which were privileged theatres ? What high-born beauty condescended to sit even in the Lord's box, which was appropriated to the few persons of distinction who attended a public play? To what then should we attribute that affluence of talent, the power, the supremacy of our elder dramatists? To liberty, and the energy it inspires;-to success, and the ardour it creates ;-to the consciousness that they were progressively extending their influence with the public * ;—and to the proud conviction, that they were at least recompensed by its grateful 'attachment. To the dramatist of those days, some theatre was always open.t The repre

*In two years, it is stated, that two play-houses were rebuilt, the Fortune and the Red Bull; and a third (the Whitefriars) erected.

† No doubt they did not act every day, and several of these theatres were very small, and, probably, not

sentation of a new play was attended with little additional expence, and the performers readily concurred in lending it their zealous support. The poet who failed in his first effort was not precluded from a second or a third attempt, and by repeatedly exercising his talents, was finally enabled to exert them with success. Few of the writers of that age arrived at eminence till after frequent trials and even reiterated defeats: but how different such trials, such discipline, such experience, from the slow revolving years of doubt and suspence, the unmitigated-the everlasting penance of tantalization and disappointment. May we not venture to believe that it was from the

much better fitted up than Marionette booths. Still, however, they served to call forth the fertility of those writers who possessed, or supposed they possessed, dramatic talents; for every theatre must have had its peculiar repertory, as the pieces were either not printed at all, or, at least, not till long after their composition.

Schlegel.

privilege of holding constant communication with the public, rather than from any romantic features of society in the 17th century, that the poet derived his strength, his felicity, his excellence? and that the degeneracy of the modern theatre originates in other causes than diffused cultivation and the progress of knowledge and refinement. It is derogatory to the drama (of which the foundation is laid in human nature) to suppose that, like the masque or pageant of the Gothic era, it derived its glory from a system of manners and customs which have long since perished. There is no human power by which the spirit of a departed age can be recalled from oblivion. The progress of society, however eccentric and vacillating, is regulated by certain immutable principles, and, even when it appears to retrograde, is never observed to retrace its former track, or to resume its primitive aspect. But admitting that the recent discoveries of knowledge

and science have been unproductive to poetry*, must it follow, that they have encroached on its original domain, and that the emanations of reason and philosophy, like a volcanic flood, have converted to ruin and waste the once brilliant scenes of passion and imagination, and swept to oblivion the ancient land-mark of nature? By what agencies shall the Chemist decompose the moral principles essential to dramatic feeling? By what collision has the electric rod divested fancy of her potent spells? Can the telescopic glimpse of distant worlds abstract the heart from its own little vibratory system, those unceasing changes and hourly revolutions of thought and feeling, in which man becomes to man the first object?

* Many branches of human knowledge have, since that time, been cultivated to a greater extent, but merely those branches which are unproductive to poetry. Chemistry, mechanics, manufactures, and rural and political economy, will never enable a man to become a poet.

Schlegel's Lectures.