en of much higher service here than
people are often ready to allow.

Human nature cannot bear to be always on the rack of business, and the
charms of sense die out with their gratification. Man, oppressed by
appetites, weary of long exertion, thirsts for refined pleasure, or
rushes into dissipations that hasten his fall and ruin, and disturb
social order. Bacchanal joys, gambling, follies of all sorts to disturb
ennui, are unavoidable if the lawgiver produces nothing better. A man of
public business, who has made noble sacrifices to the state, is apt to
pay for them with melancholy, the scholar to become a pedant, and the
people brutish, without the stage. The stage is an institution combining
amusement with instruction, rest with exertion, where no faculty of the
mind is overstrained, no pleasure enjoyed at the cost of the whole. When
melancholy gnaws the heart, when trouble poisons our solitude, when we
are disgusted with the world, and a thousand worries oppress us, or when
our energies are destroyed by over-exercise, the stage revives us, we
dream of another sphere, we recover ourselves, our torpid nature is
roused by noble passions, our blood circulates more healthily. The
unhappy man forgets his tears in weeping for another. The happy man is
calmed, the secure made provident. Effeminate natures are steeled,
savages made man, and, as the supreme triumph of nature, men of all
clanks, zones, and conditions, emancipated from the chains of
conventionality and fashion, fraternize here in a universal sympathy,
forget the world, and come nearer to their heavenly destination. The
individual shares in the general ecstacy, and his breast has now only
space for an emotion: he is a man.

ON THE TRAGIC ART.

The state of passion in itself, independently of the good or bad
influence of its object on our morality, has something in it that charms
us. We aspire to transport ourselves into that state, even if it costs
us some sacrifices. You will find this instinct at the bottom of all our
most habitual pleasures. As to the nature itself of the affection,
whether it be one of aversion or desire, agreeable or painful, this is
what we take little into consideration. Experience teaches us that
painful affections are those which have the most attraction for us, and
thus that the pleasure we take in an affection is precisely in an inverse
ratio to its nature. It is a phenomenon common to all men, that sad,
frightful things, e