lishing a relation between the drama and
religion, and the accommodating them to music and dancing; but he
omits the observation of conditions still more important, and more is
lost than gained by the substitution of the rigidly-defined and
ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the living
impersonations of the truth of human passion.

But I digress.--The connexion of scenic exhibitions with the
improvement or corruption of the manners of men, has been universally
recognized: in other words, the presence or absence of poetry in its
most perfect and universal form, has been found to be connected with
good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has been
imputed to the drama as an effect, begins, when the poetry employed in
its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners whether the
periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not
corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and
effect.

The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its
perfection, ever co-existed with the moral and intellectual greatness
of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in
which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of
circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which
every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires,
and would become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains
and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the
capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are
strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted
calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into
the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror
and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence
of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its
wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their
choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for
censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon
that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express
poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the
brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from
the simplicity of these elementary for