When we speak of the stupidity and bad taste of the plays, we do not enumerate all the disadvantages of the theatre. As if every thing connected with the establishment were doomed to be of the same order, we find the players also exciting disgust in all well-regulated minds by the strange code of morality which they have been pleased to set up for themselves. Of course, we do not shut our eyes to the numerous instances of respectable and well-behaved actors, which occur nowhere, perhaps, so frequently as in the minor capital which we inhabit. But, as we remarked in a former paper, we must not have great generalities ruined or broken down by unimportant exceptions. Taken as a whole, the players are a more dissolute fraternity than the members of any other profession; while some of them, ranking as the very highest in professional merit, commit transcendent breaches of the most sacred moral laws, as if to show how independent they are of all the rules of decent society. We would not gratify the wretched vanity which perhaps is one of the principal causes of those errors, by mentioning particular cases; but they are too notorious to require being specified. It is sometimes set forward as a plea for the extenuation of those offences, that the life of a player is more beset with temptations than any other. But what an argument is here against the whole system of play-acting! Another plea is, that the public has no business with any thing but the public appearance of a player—has no right to think of their private lives; as if a person doing all he can to destroy the safeguards of domestic happiness by action and example, were to be equally well treated by society, as a person who does what is in his power to contribute to its happiness. Society must, in the eyes of these pleaders, be a slavish thing indeed, if it is supposed that it must patiently submit to every insult and injury which it may please the sublime caprice of a buffoon to inflict upon it. And is the player judged less leniently than an offender in any other walk of life? When a tradesman commits an outrage on public decency, is he cherished on account of it by society? Is he not scouted for it, exactly as the player is, or, we should rather say, _ought to be_—for it can hardly be said that _he_ is ever condemned for his offences by the regular friends of the stage, though the theatre is, on his account, still more resolutely abstained from by the good, who abstained from it before.