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    the requisite faculties and exertions for its supply . In this it resembles and follows religion , which , in some shape or other , man wants , and society provides . Indeed , the drama has , in

    many cases , perhaps in most , sprung out of religion ; the theatre has been an appendage to the temple . This happened both with the classical drama of antiquity , and with the romantic drama of later times . If it be true , as Dr . Johnson says , that learnin g * reared the stage , ' learning was but the nurse of an orphaned offspring . When popery in England was put to death , the infantile mysteries , by which the people had been charmed on

    holidays , were nurtured by taste and poetry into all the vigour of the Elizabethan drama . Some such tenderness was needful ; for though religion generated the drama , she has not been over kind to her progeny . In the mythology of antiquity , Saturn eat his own children ; and reli gion in this case , though she could not destroy , has sorely belaboured and calumniated hers . In France ,

    the priesthood sometimes even yet make a stand against the admission of the remains of an actor into consecrated ground . In England , the pulpit and the playhouse are regarded as natural belligerents ; and even beyond the pale of puritanism , and amongst the people who most enjoy theatrical amusements , there is an association of immorality with the stage , and a disposition to consider the profession as disreputable . Why should this be so ,

    if the drama be itself a product of religion , and the theatre an invariable adjunct of an advanced state of civilization ? We cannot ascribe this feeling to any pervading horror of immoral tendency in an occupation ; for it is by no means difficult to indicate a strong tendency to immorality in professions which are held in the highest estimation , and to which parents

    are as eager to devote their children as they are solicitous to keep them from the stage . How few would hesitate to make their sons lawyers . r The world / as Mr . Campbell observes in the work before us , ' very properly holds the barrister ' s calling in high respect , and yet it is notorious that the lawyer ' s life , which makes him daily and hourly a hireling either on the right side or the

    wrong side of a cause , as his brief may chance to call him , must tend to imbue his mind with a taste for sophistry , as well as with adroitness in the practice of it . In fact , there is a great deal of acting both in courts of justice and elsewhere , that goes by a different name . * The comparison , or rather the contrast , is not here put with half its strength . There is no deception , no falsehood , in the dramatic presentation of a character . The actor no

    more attempts to pass himself for Alexander the Great , than the clergyman when he reads the lessons from the book of J <* imposes himself upon the congregation for Bildad the Shuhite . But the barrister does impose ; and that where the most import ^ results are contingent upon the success of the imposition . H * counterfeits credence ; he counterfeits feeling : intending ju < ty

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    584 Campbell ! * Life of Mrs . Siddons *

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1834, page 534, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2636/page/4/