so uncommon an one to Miss Nancy, that she
hopes she shall never see such another courtship.

We have been at the play-house several time; and, give me leave to
say, Madam, (for I have now read as well as seen several), that I
think the stage, by proper regulations, might be made a profitable
amusement.--But nothing more convinces one of the truth of the common
observation, that the best things, corrupted, prove the worst, than
these representations. The terror and compunction for evil deeds,
the compassion for a just distress, and the general beneficence which
those lively exhibitions are so capable of raising in the human mind,
might be of great service, when directed to right ends, and induced by
proper motives: particularly where the actions which the catastrophe
is designed to punish, are not set in such advantageous lights, as
shall destroy the end of the moral, and make the vice that ought to be
censured, imitable; where instruction is kept in view all the way, and
where vice is punished, and virtue rewarded.

But give me leave to say, that I think there is hardly one play I
have seen, or read hitherto, but has too much of love in it, as that
passion is generally treated. How unnatural in some, how inflaming in
others, are the descriptions of it!--In most, rather rant and fury,
like the loves of the fiercer brute animals, as Virgil, translated
by Dryden, describes them, than the soft, sighing, fearfully hopeful
murmurs, that swell the bosoms of our gentler sex: and the respectful,
timorous, submissive complainings of the other, when the truth of the
passion humanizes, as one may say, their more rugged hearts.

In particular, what strange indelicates do these writers of tragedy
often make of our sex! They don't enter into the passion at all, if I
have any notion of it; but when the authors want to paint it strongly
(at least in those plays I have seen and read) their aim seems to
raise a whirlwind, as I may say, which sweeps down reason, religion,
and decency; and carries every laudable duty away before it; so that
all the examples can serve to shew is, how a disappointed lover may
rage and storm, resent and revenge.

The play I first saw was the tragedy of _The Distressed Mother;_ and a
great many beautiful things I think there are in it: but half of it is
a tempestuous, cruel, ungoverned rant of passion, and ends in
cruelty, bloodshed, and desolation, which the truth of the story
not warranting, as Mr. B. t