THE artificial edy, or edy of manners, is quite extin our stage. greve and Farquhar show their heads on seven years only, to be exploded and put down instantly. The times ot bear them. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occasional lise of dialogue? I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw every thing up to that. Idle gallantry in a fi, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profliga a son or ward in real life should startle a parent uardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatiterests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours duration, and of no after sequence, with the severe eyes whispect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to the point of strict morality) and take it all for truth. We substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accly. We try him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis personae!, his peers. We have been spoiled with -- not seal edy but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all dev drama of on life; where the moral point is every thing; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old edy) we reise ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies, -- the same as in life, -- with an i in what is going on so hearty and substantial, that we ot afford our moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to promise or slumber for a moment. What is there transag, by no modification is made to affect us in any other mahan the same events or characters would do in our relationships of life. We carry our fire-side s to the theatre with us. We do not go thither, like our aors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to firm our experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to desd twice to the shades. All that ral ground of character, which stood between vid virtue; or whi fact was indifferent to her, where her properly was called iion; that happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning -- the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry -- is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the is of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, . We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread iion from the sic representation of disorder; and fear a painted pustule. In our ahat our morality should not take cold, we it up in a great bla surtout of precaution against the breeze and sunshine.
I fess for myself that (with no great delinqueo answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict sce, -- not to live always in the prects of the law-courts, -- but now and then, for a dream-whim or so, to imagine a world with no meddliri -- to get into recesses, whither the hunter ot follow me -
-----------Secret shades
Of woody Idas inmost grove,
While yet there was no fear of Jove --
I e bay cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more tentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the bet