With encountering these, and many other objections (the offspring of indistinct conception and cold hearts) the projectors of the present work lay their account; yet, since nothing honourable or arduous would ever be accomplished, if hope were to be extinguished by partial defeat, and a generous enterprise were to be abandoned, because it had before been tried without success, the work now proposed is undertaken, with the most firm conviction of its utility and the most unequivocal confidence of success. Let their difficulties be what they may, however, the editors are prepared to meet them, not only without fear, but with satisfaction; since they know that nothing but impossibility will be refused to undismayed perseverance and unremitting industry, and that in the work they are entering upon, they labour for the promotion of a purpose which, whatever the amount of their pecuniary advantage may be, will entitle them to public respect and to the gratitude of the rising generation. Before such proud hopes, all the little obstructions they anticipate--the cavils of the scrupulous, the doubts of the sceptical, the reluctance of the timid, the resistance of the refractory and incorrigible, and the sneers, the censures, and the sarcasms of the curious and the malignant vanish, as the gloomy chills and shades of the night recede before the glorious luminary of the morning. That the drama is a most powerful moral agent in society has been admitted by men of learning and wisdom in all ages of its existence. Whether its effects be, on the whole, injurious or not, will long be a subject of contest; but be they what they may, it can have very little influence of any kind beyond that of harmless amusement, on the wise, the pious, the learned and the experienced. Were those alone to visit theatres and be exposed to its allurements, the task of the dramatic censor might without injury be dispensed with: but since it is the young, the idle, the thoughtless, and the ignorant, on whom the drama can be supposed to operate as a lesson for conduct, an aid to experience and a guide through life, and since such persons are generally unfurnished with ideas and undefended by principles, prompt to receive first impressions, and easily susceptible of false opinions and pernicious sentiments, it becomes a matter of great importance to the commonwealth that this very powerful engine, (acting as it does upon our youth through the delightful medium of amusement, and by the instrumentality of every circumstance that can lay hold of the fancy, and through the senses fascinate the heart) should be kept under the control of a systematic, a vigilant and a severe, but a just criticism.