y-sided, and draws from all foreign schools
their distinctive elements to fuse into one new, harmonious whole.

It is our fashion to speak of the decline of the Drama, to lament not
only a decay of morals, manners, and elocution, but the desertion of
standard excellence for the frippery which only appeals to the lightest
popular taste. But this outcry proceeds mostly from old fogies, and
those who only reverence the past, while the halo which gilds the
memories of youth is the cause of its ceaseless repetition. For it has
been heard through every period. It was in the era when our greatest
dramas were created that Ben Jonson, during a fit of the spleen,
occasioned by the failure of "The New Inn," begat these verses "to
himself":--

"Come, leave the loathed stage,
And this more loathsome age,
Where pride and impudence, in faction knit,
Usurp the chair of wit!
Inditing and arranging every day
Something they call a play."

At the commencement of our own century, and in what we are wont to
consider the Roscian Period of the British stage, its condition seemed
so deplorable to Leigh Hunt, then the dramatic critic of "The News," as
to require "An Essay on the Appearance, Causes, and Consequences of the
Decline of British Comedy." "Of Tragedy," he wrote, "we have nothing;
and it is the observation of all Europe that the British Drama is
rapidly declining." Yet the golden reign of the Kembles was then in its
prime; and such names as Bannister, Fawcett, Matthews, Elliston, and
Cooke occur in Hunt's graceful and authoritative sketches of the actors
of the day.[E] As to the newer plays, Gifford said, "All the fools in
the kingdom seem to have exclaimed with one voice, Let us write for the
theatre!" Latter-day croakers would have us believe that the Tragic
Muse, indignant at the desecration of her English altars, took flight
across the ocean, alighting in solemn majesty at the Old Park Theatre of
New York, but that she disappeared utterly in the final conflagration of
that histrionic shrine. Well, there are smouldering remnants of the Old
Park still left to us; veteran retainers of the conventional stride, the
disdainful gesture, the Kemble elocution, and that accent which was
justly characterized as

"Ojus, insijjus, hijjus, and perfijjus!"

But the Muse is immortal, though so changing the fashion of her garb, it
would appear, as often to fail of recognition from a