involuntarily puts on a resemblance to them in his gestures. Children are
perpetually going out of themselves; it is one of their chief amusements
to represent those grown people whom they have had an opportunity of
observing, or whatever strikes their fancy; and with the happy pliancy of
their imagination, they can exhibit all the characteristics of any dignity
they may choose to assume, be it that of a father, a schoolmaster, or a
king. But one step more was requisite for the invention of the drama,
namely, to separate and extract the mimetic elements from the separate
parts of social life, and to present them to itself again collectively in
one mass; yet in many nations it has not been taken. In the very minute
description of ancient Egypt given by Herodotus and other writers, I do
not recollect observing the smallest trace of it. The Etruscans, on the
contrary, who in many respects resembled the Egyptians, had theatrical
representations; and what is singular enough, the Etruscan name for an
actor _histrio_, is preserved in living languages even to the present
day. The Arabians and Persians, though possessed of a rich poetical
literature, are unacquainted with the drama. It was the same with Europe
in the Middle Ages. On the introduction of Christianity, the plays handed
down from the Greeks and Romans were set aside, partly because they had
reference to heathen ideas, and partly because they had degenerated into
the most shameless immorality; nor were they again revived till after the
lapse of nearly a thousand years. Even in the fourteenth century, in that
complete picture which Boccacio gives us of the existing frame of society,
we do not find the smallest trace of plays. In place of them they had
simply their _conteurs_, _menestriers_, _jongleurs_. On the other hand we
are by no means entitled to assume that the invention of the drama was
made once for all in the world, to be afterwards borrowed by one people
from another. The English circumnavigators tell us, that among the
islanders of the South Seas, who in every mental qualification and
acquirement are at the lowest grade of civilization, they yet observed a