history of the highway. The vices which now haunt theatres are no more
necessary to their nature, than to the senate or the palace. Why should
not the State interpose to prevent the sale of poison on the stage, as
in the streets? Why should it not offer prizes and honours for great
tragedies and comedies, as soon as it would for a voyage to the Arctic
or Antarctic? But is dramatic genius dead in England? What, in England!
where nothing dies--where every faculty of the heart and understanding
is in the most perpetual activity--where the noblest impulses are
perpetually pushing forward to the noblest ends--where human nature
moves in all its vigour, from hour to hour, without disguise--where the
whole anatomy of the moral frame is visible, and all its weakness, and
all its wonders, are the daily spectacle of all mankind!

In giving these opinions of the powers of the stage, need I guard them
by saying, that I contemplate a higher spirit than the drama even of
Shakspeare has ever displayed--one which, to the vigour of his
characters, and the splendours of his poetry, should add a moral of
which his time was scarcely conscious? My idea would approach more
nearly the objects of the great Greek dramas, in which the first
sympathies of the people were appealed to by the most powerful
recollections of historic virtue; their national victories over the
Persian, the lofty conceptions of their Olympus, the glories of their
national power, and the prospects of their imperishable renown. I
contemplate nothing of the weakness, locality, or license, of our old
drama. I think only of a rich and lofty combination of characters above
the level of our time, thoughts belonging to that elevation, feelings
more generous, vivid, and majestic, and exploits uniting the soaring
spirit of old romance with the sustained strength of modern energy;
Greece in her brightest days of intellectual lustre, Rome in her most
heroic days of patriotism, and England in those days which are yet to