What has been stated sufficiently proves the powerful control which the public exercised over the stage. The popular taste demanded an agreeable amusement, created by the boldest and most varied mixture of the serious and the comic, of intrigues, sallies of the imagination and ingenious thoughts, of surprises and animated situations; but it was not required that either a comic or a tragic scene should tend to produce any moral impression on the heart, except indeed in so far as that object may be attributed to the spiritual pieces. But how did it happen that a people in whom moral gravity has ever been a national characteristic, should thus shew themselves indifferent to the moral effects of their dramatic entertainments. The history of the formation of the Spanish character appears to disclose the cause of this incongruity so clearly, that it might be said, nature would have contradicted herself, had not such been the consequence resulting from that cause. When the treasures of America came to be dispersed through Spain, luxury and extravagance superseded the old Spanish simplicity. The age of chivalry was past; and the ecclesiastical fetters imposed upon opinion and conscience, afforded so little freedom to the mind, that it was not possible the public could endure, still less enjoy, moral reflection on the stage. The Spaniard, as a catholic Christian, devoutly and implicitly submitted his understanding to the doctrines and mandates of the church; but as a man he ardently longed for amusements, in which he might allow his heart freely to participate. Moral reflection then could not be pleasing in any place where he sought to be gratified by the unconstrained exercise of his feelings; for every moral thought tended to revive the recollection of the inquisition. Meanwhile the progress of luxury and the love of pleasure stimulated the imagination, and increased the appetite for sports of wit and fancy, which were pushed to the most extravagant excess. A people of an ardent and enthusiastic temperament, which a genial climate fostered, were always eager to partake of pleasures which no king or grand inquisitor threatened to disturb. With a taste thus formed, and with such claims on dramatic entertainment, the Spaniards were not to be satisfied with the most ingenious comedies or tragedies, unless the wildest revels of the imagination and a succession of joyous and luxuriant forms agitated and interested the mind, and freed it from all the fetters of maxims and rules of art. To see a variegated ideal world, a diversified picture of romantic existence, was the object for which the Spaniard visited the theatre, where he could endure no sort of regularity, not even that which the nature of the subject seemed most to require.