[19] It is fortunate for the managers of the Park Theatre, and very unfortunate for the citizens of New York, that the audiences who frequent that place of entertainment are chiefly composed of the strangers who are constantly passing in vast numbers through this city. It is not worth the while of the management to pay a good company, when an indifferent one answers their purpose quite as well: the system upon which theatrical speculations are conducted in this country is, having one or two "stars" for the principal characters, and nine or ten sticks for all the rest. The consequence is, that a play is never decently acted, and at such times as stars are scarce, the houses are very deservedly empty. The terrestrial audiences suffer much by this mode of getting up plays; but the celestial performers, the stars propped upon sticks, infinitely more. [20] Stewart--Bonfanti. The name of shopkeepers in Broadway: the former's is the best shop in New York. [21] Were the morality that I constantly hear uttered a little more consistent, not only with right reason, but with itself, I think it might be more deserving of attention and respect. But the mock delicacy, which exists to so great a degree with regard to theatrical exhibitions, can command neither the one nor the other. To those who forbid all dramatic representations, as exhibitions of an unhealthy tendency upon our intellectual and moral nature, I have no objections, at present, to make. Unqualified condemnation, particularly when adopted on such grounds, may be a sincere, a respectable, perhaps a right, opinion. I have but one reply to offer to it: the human mind requires recreation; is not a theatre (always supposing it to be, not what theatres too often are, but what they ought to be), is not a theatre a better, a higher, a more noble, and useful place of recreation than a billiard-room, or the bar of a tavern? Perhaps in the course of the moral and intellectual improvement of mankind, _all_ these will give way to yet purer and more refined sources of recreation; but in the mean time, I confess, with its manifold abuses, a play-house appears to me worthy of toleration, if not of approbation, as holding forth (when directed as it should be) a highly intellectual, rational, and refined amusement.