ing to
balls. The austerity of principle, in the strictly religious portion of
the community, is justly considered as a great bar to dramatic success;
as it keeps from the theatre a large part of society, which, from the
integrity and purity of its principles, would, if it frequented such
places of amusement, be more likely than any other to counteract its
downward tendency. The hideous mass of profligacy which in London, in
the absence of the better classes of society, has seized upon the
principal theatres as its natural prey, is loudly complained of by the
heads of families; and the audience is, in consequence, too often turned
into little more than strangers, or young men in quest of dissipation,
and ladies of easy virtue in quest of gain. The spread of reading, and
vast addition to the amount of talent devoted to the composition of
novels and romances, is another cause generally considered as mainly
instrumental in producing the neglect of the theatre. Sir Walter Scott,
it is said, has brought the drama to our fireside: we draw in our
easy-chairs when the winds of winter are howling around us, and cease to
long for _Hamlet_ in reading the _Bride of Lammermoor_. There is some
reality in all these causes assigned for the decline of the legitimate
drama in this country; they are the truth, but they are not the whole
truth. A very little consideration will at once show, that it is not to
any or all of these causes, that the decline of the higher branches of
this noble art in Great Britain is to be ascribed.

Modern manners, late dinners, ball-dresses, and the Houses of
Parliament, are doubtless serious obstacles to the higher classes of the
nobility and gentry frequently attending the theatre; but the example of
the Opera-house, which is crowded night after night with the elite of
that very class, is sufficient to demonstrate, that all these
difficulties can be got over, when people of fashion make up their minds
to go to a place of amusement, even where not one in ten understand the
language in which the piece is composed. The strictness of
principle--mistaken, as we deem it, and hurtful in its effects--which
keeps away a large and important portion of the middle and most
respectable portion of the community, at all times, and in all places,
from the theatre, is without doubt a very serious impediment to dramatic
success, and in nothing so much so, as in throwing the patronage and
direction of its performance into the