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 or depravation of the mind. The stage, without a necessity for further restraints, promotes the cause of good morals, whenever, by the personated imitation of some history or fable,—drawn to an impressive conclusion by principles and actions natural to the agents who produce it,—we are instructed to love virtue and abhor vice.

Shakspeare's disregard of the rules to which the tragedians of antiquity appear to have generally confined themselves, has been much insisted on by Voltaire, and others both of his nation and our own, as an insurmountable obstacle to the theatrical effect of his plays; and, indeed, in their skirmishes against them, they have employed every