Often and often had I read Gay's 'Beggar's Opera', and always delighted with its poignant wit and original satire, and if not without noticing its immorality, yet without any offence from it. Some years ago, I for the first time saw it represented in one of the London theatres; and such were the horror and disgust with which it impressed me, so grossly did it outrage all the best feelings of my nature, that even the angelic voice, and perfect science of Mrs. Billington, lost half their charms, or rather increased my aversion to the piece by an additional sense of incongruity. Then I learned the immense difference between reading and seeing a play;--and no wonder, indeed; for who has not passed over with his eye a hundred passages without offence, which he yet could not have even read aloud, or have heard so read by another person, without an inward struggle?--In mere passive silent reading the thoughts remain mere thoughts, and these too not our own,--phantoms with no attribute of place, no sense of appropriation, that flit over the consciousness as shadows over the grass or young corn in an April day. But even the sound of our own or another's voice takes them out of that lifeless, twilight, realm of thought, which is the confine, the 'intermundium', as it were, of existence and non-existence. Merely that the thoughts have become audible by blending with them a sense of outness gives them a sort of reality. What then,--when by every contrivance of scenery, appropriate dresses, according and auxiliary looks and gestures, and the variety of persons on the stage, realities are employed to carry the imitation of reality as near as possible to perfect delusion? If a manly modesty shrinks from uttering an indecent phrase before a wife or sister in a private room, what must be the effect when a repetition of such treasons (for all gross and libidinous allusions are emphatically treasons against the very foundations of human society, against all its endearing charities, and all the mother virtues,) is hazarded before a mixed multitude in a public theatre? When every innocent woman must blush at once with pain at the thoughts she rejects, and with indignant shame at those, which the foul hearts of others may attribute to her!