There are in the exhibited drama three provinces or directions, the lower, the intermediate, and the higher, or Comedy, Melodrama, and Tragedy. In the lower drama, inferior types of men and manners are exhibited for the various purposes of amusement, ridicule, satire, correction. The direction of the moral and social faculties of the spectators towards the persons and actions they contemplate is downward from their own or the social mental standards of virtue, propriety, and grace to the real exemplifications before them, the descending movement which accompanies their perception of the incongruity awakening laughter or tendencies to laughter, scorn or tendencies to scorn, with a reflex of complacency in themselves. Comedy teaches, so far as it ventures to teach at all and does not content itself with mere entertainment, by the principle of opposition and contrast, showing what _not_ to do and how _not_ to do it, suggesting grace by awkwardness, hinting refinement by vulgarity, setting off beauty and dignity by ugliness and triviality. This, as every one must see, is a varied, effective, and fruitful mode of direct instruction as well as of indirect and unpurposed educational moulding. No one can well be thoroughly familiar with the genteel comedy of the theatres and remain a boor. Such a familiarity is of itself a sort of social education. In the higher drama, or Tragedy, the superior social types, lords, ladies, geniuses, kings, and the nobler styles of character, heroes, martyrs, saints, are represented, to awaken admiration and reverence, to stir emulous and aspiring desires. Pity, love, and awe, the profoundest passions and capacities of the soul, are moved and expanded. The mysteries of fate and providence are shadowed forth, and the most insoluble problems of morality and religion indirectly agitated. Transcendent degrees of power, virtue, success, and glory, or failure and suffering, are indicated; and all our upward-looking faculties are put on the stretch, with the result of assimilating more or less of the forms of being and experience on which they sympathizingly gaze aloft. Here we are taught, sometimes with a distinct aim, oftener by an unpurposed, contagious kindling of suggested thought and feeling, innumerable lessons pertaining to human nature and experience, the varieties of character and conduct, the limits and retributions of virtue and vice, the extremes of hope and despair, the portentous question of death, the omnipresent laws of God. How much one shall be affected and changed, inspired and aided, by all this, depends on his docility and earnestness in front of it, his plasticity under it. But it is plain that it can scarcely be repeated and continued without important effects on all who are not dolts.