We have all seen, within a few years, one of the most
profound scholars and most prominent divines in the country proclaiming his
approbation of the drama. We may find, to-day, in any Eastern city, members
of the liberal clergy at an opera, and sometimes at a play. The scholars
and writers and artists and thinkers, as well as the people of leisure and
of fashion, frequent places of amusement, not only for amusement, but to
cultivate their tastes, to exercise their intellects, ay, and oftentimes to
refine their hearts. The splendid homage paid in England not long ago to
the drama, when the highest nobility and the first statesmen in the land
were present at a banquet in honor of Charles Kean, is evidence enough that
no puerile or uncultivated taste is this which relishes the theatre. Goethe
presiding over the playhouse at Weimar, Euripides and Sophocles writing
tragedies, the greatest genius of the English language acting in his own
productions at the Globe Theatre, people like Siddons and Kean and Cushman
and Macready illustrating this art with the resources of their fine
intellects and great attainments,--surely these need scarcely be mentioned,
to relieve the drama from the reproach that some would put upon it, of
puerility.
New York is, perhaps, more of a representative city than any other in the
land. It is an aggregation from all the other portions of the country; it
is the result, the precipitate, of the whole. It has no distinctive,
individual character of its own; it is a condensation of all the rest, a
focus.
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