This supplement began with the statement that among the earliest information that we possess respecting the drama in America, is a passage in a letter objecting to the performance of a play, and it may be appropriately closed by a brief enumeration of the objections generally made to the theater, and the conclusion that seems to follow from a review of them. It is a characteristic of those who object to the theater altogether that they rarely, if ever, give any consideration to the origin of the drama, to its long continuance, or appreciate that it will continue as long as civilization continues, and this applies as well to those who have written elaborate treatises against it, like Jeremy Collier, as to those who object to it generally. The briefest form of stating this consideration is that the theater has its origin in human nature. In the researches made as to its origin it is found that it has sprung up spontaneously among different peoples, and has not been transmitted by one people more advanced in civilization to another that was less so. Thus the rise of the drama, such as it is, in India and in China has in no way been influenced by the Greeks, who carried the cultivation of it to a higher degree than any other people of antiquity. The oldest civilization with which we are acquainted is that of Egypt. Whether it existed among the Egyptians, whether they had what we call a theater, the extensive researches that have been made within the present century so far as I have been able to ascertain do not indicate,[23] but that it existed at a very early period in China, in Persia, and in India we have ample evidence, and in China and India it has from its beginning been a recreation greatly enjoyed by the people; to which may be added as a general observation that certain races have more aptitude for the enjoyment of it than others, and greater natural capacity either as a gift from nature or for acquiring what is requisite in the actor or dramatist. That some men are endowed by nature in a higher degree than others with the qualities that make a man eminent as a dramatist or an actor is sufficiently indicated in the one case by Shakespeare, and in the other by Garrick, of the latter of whom it may be said, in the language of Mr. Baker, the historian of the London stage, that “without any previous apprenticeship, preparation, or drudgery, at a remote end of the town that had hitherto been as unknown to fashion as the wilds of Africa, without preliminary puffing of any kind, he took the whole play-going public by storm, made men old in prejudice forget the idols of their youth and like Pope confess that he never had his equal. * * * From “Richard III.” to “Abel Drugger,” from “King Lear” to “Don Felix,” from “Macbeth” to “Bayes,” his tragic force, his keen sense of humor, his marvelous genius carried everything before it;” and this combination of equal excellence, and in the