rom its
propriety, and gave monthly or quarterly assurance to a great people that
they possessed a great living Poet, worthy of being numbered with their
mightiest dead.

He began with the Play-house.

The theatre! Satire belongs to the day, and the theatre belongs to the
day. They seem well met. The spirit of both is the same--intense
popularity. Actors are human beings placed in an extraordinary relation to
other human beings: public characters; but brought the nearer to us by
being so--the good ones intimate with our bosoms, dear as friends. Their
persons, features, look, gait, gesture, familiar to our thoughts, vividly
engraven. They address themselves to every one of us personally, in tones
that thrill and chill, or that convulse us with merriment--and all for
pleasure! They ask our sympathy, but they task it not. No burthen of
distress that they may lay upon us do we desire to rid off our hearts. We
only call for more, more! They stir up the soul within us, as nothing else
in which, personally, we are quite unconcerned, does. Therefore the praise
or sarcasm that visits them, comes home to the privacy of our own
feelings. Besides, they belong to the service of the Muse; and so the
other servant of the Muse, the Satirist, as the superintendent of the
household, may reasonably reprehend or commend them. Further, they offer
themselves to favour and to disfavour, to praise, to dispraise; to the
applauding hands or to the exploding hisses of the public. There is, then
an attraction of fame-bestowing verse towards the stage. And yet does it
not seem a pity that the unfortunate bad actors should "bide the pelting
of _this_ pitiless storm," over and above that of others they are liable
to be assailed with? What great-minded Satirist could step down a
play-bill from the first rank of performers to the second and the
third--hunting out miserable mediocrities--dragging away the culprits of
the stage to flagellation and the pillory? Say then, at once, that the
Satirist is not great-minded, and his motives are not pure desires for the
general benefit. He is by the gift of nature witty, and rather
ill-natured. He very much enjoys his own wit, and he hopes that you have
fun enough in you to enjoy his jests, and so he breaks them. THE ROSCIAD
is, we believe, by far the best of Churchill's performances; very clever,
indeed, and characteristic; at the head of all theatrical criticism in
verse; yet an achievement, in spite of the ta