But we can not at present dwell upon this view in its more general aspects. In the more immediate effect upon actors and actresses themselves we find the radical cause of the vicious lives which have ever characterized them as a class. Men and women who act every character will have no character of their own. The dangerous faculty of assuming any passion, and any supposed moral state, must, in the end, be inconsistent with that earnestness of feeling without which there can be neither moral nor intellectual depth. We have neither time nor space to dwell upon those evil effects of theatrical representations which are best known and most generally admitted. Whoever demands proof of them may be referred to the records of our Criminal Courts. We would rather search for the root of the evil. It is here in the most interior idea of the drama that we find the virus fountain from which all its poison flows, and of which what are called the incidental evils, are but the necessary ultimate manifestations. It is not found simply in the personation of vicious characters, whether in the shape of heroic crime or vulgar comedy. The radical mischief is in the fact that the theatre is the great storehouse and seminary of _false feeling_; and all false feeling, without the exception even of the religious (in fact, the higher the pretension the greater the evil), is so much spiritual poison. By this we mean an emotion and a sentimentality having no ground in any previous healthy moral state with which they may be organically connected. No fact is more certain than that such a seeming virtue may be called out in the worst of men, and that instead of truly softening and meliorating, it invariably exerts a hardening influence, rendering the affections less capable of being aroused to the genuine duties and genuine benevolence of real life. It is indeed a blessed and a blissful thing to have a feeling heart; but, then, the feeling must be real; that is, as we have defined it, flowing from within as the legitimate product of a true, moral organism. Better be without all feeling than have that which is the unnatural result of artificial stimulus. Better that the soul be an arid desert than that it should be watered by such Stygian streams, or luxuriate in the rank Upas of such a deadly verdure. There is evidence in abundance that a man may melt under the influence of a theatrical sentimentality, and yet go forth to the commission of the worst of crimes; with a freedom, too, all the greater for the fictitious virtue under which his true character has been so completely concealed from his own eyes.