Page:Orange Grove.djvu/77

 "I know it. We do homage to talent wherever we find it. I suppose it is all we can expect of a theatre since it professes to be only a place of amusement, totally indifferent to the moral or immoral influences engendered, farther than to ensure a successful patronage from the community. I was thinking of the good it might exert, calling into exercise our highest and noblest feelings by arraying in equally attractive colors the triumphs of virtue over vice, instead of displaying so much that is bloody and revengeful, to kindle the passions. Love of the dramatic is implanted within us which it is lawful to gratify within certain limits. I do not think it displays a highly cultivated and refined mind to be a habitual visitor at the theatre, for the reasons I have stated, yet if well disciplined will generally be proof against its debasing effects, from the fact that it can have no affinity with the lower passions. But before the character is formed there may be great danger of vitiating the moral sense with such an indiscriminate mixture of virtue and vice, therefore I have been very guarded in taking you there. I did not think it best to exclude you from it entirely as the time must come when you will have to mix with the world, discover its baseness and hypocrisy, and also be surprised with much that is noble and honorable where you least expect to find it."

"You think then that we may learn something of real life there don't you?"

"Oh yes, as we do in novels. A proper discrimination is to be made. The sickly, sentimental trash that has so disgusted Walter should be universally