the Bohon Upas, and resort to the works of such poets and sages, as Dante and Tasso, Milton and Montgomery, Wordsworth and Campbell; Luther and Calvin, Bacon and Boyle, Sidney and Barrows; adding to these, and others like them, that volume which is incomparably the greatest and the best of all that ever was written. You will then, and not till then, be in a fair way to become "in conscious virtue bold;" and to find, if not the long sought for and never to be discovered philosopher's stone, that far more precious stone, which certain ancient and blinded builders rejected; but which is now the chief corner stone of that heavenly habitation whose builder is God, and whose "many mansions" are reserved for the blissful and eternal repose of "the spirits of just men made perfect." And, again, as to tyrants and villains of every description, there has, we believe never been one the less of them from all the efforts of all the stage-players that ever existed; so that instead of taming the "savage nature" of tyrants, and making "foes to virtue wonder how they wept;" the fact is, that tyrants have never visited the Theatre to learn lessons of freedom and humanity, any more than pick-pockets and black-legs have gone there to learn common honesty, instead of looking out for subjects to prey upon; and Mr. Pope, we believe, would have found it

an easier task to bottle all the tears ever extorted there from "foes to virtue," than he did to write the couplet we have quoted: And hence, we proceed to say, in answer to your second question, Mr. Nimrod, that we have seen a thousand plays at least, and never yet saw a single character exhibited "from every day life," in its "true aspect." Never indeed have we spent a single evening at a Theatre, which we do not now look upon as having been utterly, madly, wickedly wasted: And the few characters which we have seen the most truly represented, were not taken from every day life. Shylock, Iago, Othello, &c., are not every day characters. They are in the moral world, what comets are in the planetary system; and the same may be said of Cæser, Brutus, Mark Antony, &c. But all these are exhibited on the modern stage, not so much in character as in caricature: And as to the characters in the wider range of comedy and farce, which are generally intended for your "every day" characters, no man of sense and accurate observation of his own or any other times, will pretend that they are ever any thing else upon the stage than the most extravagant caricatures; such characters indeed are never found in "every day life," nor in any other sort of life: In short, the whole drama, as written, is little else than fiction, to

lerable, and even instructive in some parts of it, in the closet, but too often, if not always, worse than fiction, worse than folly, worse than nonsense, on the stage. I defy you, sir, if you travel through all the states of Europe and America, to find any man of candor and sound judgment, who will say that he ever met in real life with any such characters as are now constantly exhibited on the London and New-York stages: And if they could be found, what are they good for, either by way of example, precept or principle? What use can be made of any of themnot that we are all for use-in the intellectual, literary, scientific, moral or religious world? The answer is none at all-they are good for nothing, unless it be to "suckle fools and chronicle small beer;" or in other words, and perhaps more correctly, to tickle fools, and pocket their loose change-this is all that they are good for-and well would it be for the fools if their small change was the only sacrifice to one of the worst relics of heathen and barbarous states; for such were Greece and Rome in their best days→→ an ignorant, deluded semi-barbarous rabble, with here and there a man of splendid genius among them, such as Homer, Virgil, Thucydides, Livy, and a number of others, poets, orators and warriors, who, however, if disposed to perform the work, could do them no good, for want of

the art of printing. We must not be told that because some arts flourished, and certain arts originated in Greece and Rome, therefore they were civilized. Whoever is acquainted with our savages, or has visited Mr. Catlin's very interesting, novel and highly ingenious exhibition of Indian dresses, war implements, &c. will perceive that the rise and progress of art is no proof of the rise or progress of civilization. The germ of civilization is in the heart, and must be made to shoot forth and expand by education, and that alone; and not education merely-but christian education-for no nation can be civilized, strictly speaking, till it is thoroughly and universally christianized-until every family in a nation understands and feels the full force of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that nation is not civilized; but in proportion to the number of families not thus understanding, and feeling, and acting upon the precepts and principles of Christ, in that proportion is it a barbarous nation. It may boast of its being enlightened-of its numerous works of art-its splendid edifices-its invincible legions and bulwarks of defence—and of its mighty march of intellect; and yet, after all this, without heart-felt christianity, it is without civilization in the true sense of the term, and little if any better than barbarian-or at the best, semi-barbarian.

To your third question-"Is not virtue presented in all its loveliness, and vice in all its deformity?" I answer again-NO-no such presentment: For when virtue is represented, more than half the time it is some heathenish principle, dignified by infidel philosophers, perhaps, with the name of virtue; but bearing no more the resemblance of real virtue, than the odious image of Satan bears to the all-beautiful image of God: But whenever real virtue is represented, the scene is invariably accompanied by such an incongruous association of ideas produced by surrounding objects, and extravagant action, as to make but little if any impression on the mind or heart even of a serious and well disposed auditor; and on probably nine persons out of ten it makes no impression at all. It is idle to suppose, that amid the senseless clappings" and shoutings, grimaces and grins, of the pit and the gallery, to say nothing of too much of the same sort of folly and racket among even the "good society," as they no doubt think themselves in the boxes, any person ever so seriously disposed can get into the proper frame of mind to derive strong and useful impressions from what is going on upon the stage. The "loveliness" of virtue, therefore, under such circumstances, is, perhaps, as a general rule, no more noticed or thought of by the spectators, than it