us, instead of the vigorous passions and virtues clad in
flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present us.
Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in the
differences, the quarrels, the animosities of man, a beauty
and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the iterately
inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us all
is hypocritical meekness. A reconciliation scene (let the
occasion be never so absurd or unnatural) is always sure of
applause. Our audiences come to the theatre to be
complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the
amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful
similarity of disposition between them. We have a common
stock of dramatic morality out of which a writer may be
supplied without the trouble of copying from originals
within his own breast. To know the boundaries of honour, to
be judiciously valiant, to have a temperance which shall
beget a smoothness in the angry swellings of youth, to
esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputation of a
parent is to be defended, yet to shake and tremble under a
pious cowardice when that ark of an honest confidence is
found to be frail and tottering, to feel the true blows of a
real disgrace blunting that sword which the imaginary
strokes of a supposed false imputation had put so keen an
edge upon but lately; to do, or to imagine this done in a
feigned story, asks something more of a moral sense,
somewhat a greater delicacy of perception in questions of
right and wrong, than goes to the writing of two or three
hackneyed sentences about the laws of honour as opposed to
the laws of the land or a commonplace against duelling. Yet
such things would stand a writer nowadays in far better