We made the tour of the theatres and shows
one evening,--glad to escape the gloom and dinginess of the hotel, once
the pride of the city, but now its reproach. Surely there is no other
city of two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants that is so miserably
provided with the means of public amusement as Cincinnati. At the first
theatre we stumbled into, where Mr. Owens was performing in the
Bourcicault version of "The Cricket on the Hearth," there was a large
audience, composed chiefly of men. It was the very dirtiest theatre we
ever saw. The hands of the ticket-taker were not grimy,--they were
black. The matting on the floor, the paint, and all the interior, were
thoroughly unclean; and not a person in the audience seemed to have
thought it necessary to show respect to the place, or to the presence of
a thousand of his fellow-citizens, by making any change in his dress.
The ventilation was bad, of course. No fresh air could be admitted
without exposing some of the audience to draughts. The band consisted of
seven musicians. The play, which is very pleasing and simple, was
disfigured in every scene by the interpolation of what the actors call
"gags,"--that is, vulgar and stupid additions to the text by the actors
themselves,--in which we were sorry to hear the "star" of the occasion
setting a bad example. Actors ought to know that when Charles Dickens
and Dion Bourcicault unite their admirable talents in the production of
a play, no one else can add a line without marring the work. They might
at least be aware that Western colloquialisms, amusing as they are, do
not harmonize with the conversation of an English cottage. Yet this
Cincinnati audience was delighted with the play, in spite of all these
drawbacks, so exquisitely adapted is the drama to move and entertain
human beings.

At the West, along with much reckless and defiant unbelief in everything
high and good, there is also a great deal of that terror-stricken
pietism which refuses to attend the theatre unless it is very bad
indeed, and is called "Museum." This limits the business of the theatre;
and, as a good theatre is necessarily a very expensive institution, it
improves very slowly, although the Western people are in precisely that
stage of development and culture to which the drama is best adapted and
is most beneficial. We should naturally expect to find the human mind,
in the broad, magnificent West, rising superior to the prejudices
originating in the li