the tattered garb of poverty-Yet Violet was happy-happier far than many a daughter of indolence and fashion-without a want or a wish ungratified-reclining on a velvet couch... the richly spread breakfast-table before her, turning listlessly over the pages of the "Last new novel", and doubtful to which of the hundred well-known, monotonous, and exhausted haunts of pleasure, she shall be borne in her gay equipage...which of her many elegant and modish costumes shall array her languid charms, and which of her many fades, blasès, lisping, tedious cavaliers, shall bear at once her shawl and her impertinence, and inflict on her his ennui and his vapidity. Yes, like salt to the ocean, light and air to the flower, and spirit to the lamp, is Hope to the human heart, and some object, (difficult but not unattainable) to the human mind. Violet has already enjoyed the luxury of sending one five pound note, with a letter full of virtuous confidence, though mysterious still, to her dear VOL. I. relatives at the Manor House;' and she was just-having mastered her part, and completed her costume-hesitating whether she could afford a mutton chop or not for her frugal repast, when a carriage drove up to her door, putting her landlady and little maid-of-allwork in what they called a fluster,' and which compels us to drive off to the Ordes' in search of an explanation. CHAPTER XX. Pour et contre. WHATEVER the enemies of the Drama may assert, and whatever the bigotted and puritanical may profess to believe, the experience of most of us (if candidly revealed) would establish the fact, that there is something ennobling to the human mind, and softening to the human heart in the best and highest order of dramatic representations. To accustom the mind-the youthful mind especially-to what is gross, profligate, or profane must of course be to dull the purity of the spirit, to sully the whiteness of the soul, to brush the bloom from the fruit; but co-equal with the power to injure, by what is low and bad, is that of benefitting by what is great and good. And it is our firm belief that, (after the inspired writings themselves) the seeds of virtue, honor, truth, valor and delicacy have never been so abundantly sown from any source as from the best of Shakespeare's plays; and indeed from other and more modern dramatic writers whose noble aim is to do good rather than to court popularity! The Dramatic Muse, fallen, degraded, deserted as she is, might yet, by powerful and judicious hands, be raised from the mire, purified, reinstated, re-enthroned, and rank, (far below, indeed,) but still next in station to 'Lovely Religion,' in the blessed office of deterring men from evil, and urging them to what is great and good!... Filial ingratitude never seems so black, so deadly as when we listen to vile Regan, or the basely triumphant Goneril; never does a daughter's devotion seem so lovely and so worthy of imitation as in sweet Cordelia; and never do we so loathe the vice of the bad, or so love the dutiful tenderness of the good as when, through blinding tears, we gaze on the betrayed, the outraged, the discrowned Lear himself!... Again how meanly hideous is the weak woman, prompted by ambition and vile murderous treason, of hen-pecked Macbeth; and what homily on murder and the murderer's undying remorse could surpass the writhings of conscience, while, we behold them as gradually they madden-blast-that she-Lucifer, Lady Macbeth! What woman but glories the more in her own purity, and resolves to guard it as the pearl of price, when she sees Desdemona's |