If the players thus debase themselves by the impurity of their lives, and thereby render themselves unfit to be looked upon or listened to by the majority of society—if they continue to represent dramas suited to the taste of a past age, or else adapted only to the sympathies of children—if they persist in retaining about their whole system vicious forms of speech, indelicate gestures, and a code of moral feeling and action, all of which have long been pronounced intolerable in good society, how can they expect their theatres to be so prosperous as they once were, more especially when purer and better modes of entertainment are every where rising into competition with them? The person who pens these thoughts is by no means an enemy to theatricals in the abstract. With the most respectful deference to those who see in dramatic entertainments an express hostility to the divine law, he retains the conviction that they might be rendered as good and innocent a means as any other for producing that great end—the diversion of the public mind by amusement from the follies and vices of absolute vacuity. He does not consider the theatre, or any other amusement, so much with a reference to the good which it may do, as with respect to the evil which it may prevent. It is clear, however, that the really good and pure can never become the friends of the theatre, so long as it remains unreformed. There must be a combination among the virtuous actors to exclude the vicious from their body. A number of antiquated and absurd fashions of the stage must be brought nearer to the standard of ordinary natural life. And the best literary men of the day must be encouraged by legislative enactments to produce a crop of new plays with a stronger moral bent than the generality of those now existing. Till all this is done, and the theatre become as noted in public fame for a friendliness to what is good, as it has hitherto been for the reverse, it must be content to occupy its present degraded place amongst our prevailing modes of public entertainment. RECOGNITIONS. “Dignus vindice _nod_-us.”——