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Untitled Article
their stumps " might as well " be left alone in their glory " for what society at large would care . With respect to the drama , the sensual taste has already progressed through its prime lunations and is now beginning to make its way among the middle or respectable class , over whose filberts and old i
port , the : head " of the family is occasionally heard to say that u the true drama is pretty well extinct—no thorough tragedies or real comedies are brought out—Macready and Farren , you see , scarcely ever appear , the people are spectaclestruck and music-mad—the taste of the time has changed , and
in my humble opinion very much for the worse . I remember when John Kemble , &c , &c . " The worthy veteran never thinks of adding that all this moral and intellectual destitution and perversion has originated with , and is continued solely by the present '' cast" of managers , who have done their best to turn the most influential of all our national
establishments , into the bear-gardens and bagnios , with which their own private tastes , characters , and experience have an exclusive affinity . The shows addressed to the external senses , whether on the stage of art or actual life , in public or in private , are temporary in themselves , and evanescent . Unless they excite the passions , the imagination , and the reason , singly or collectively ,
their strong , healthy , and original effect being very limited as to variety , soon terminates in one of an opposite kind ; languor and palled disgust . We have said this gross taste has begun to make its way among the middle class ; perhaps , it has even made a considerable progress . No matter , the evil will work
its own cure . 1 he impossibility of producing a succession of novelties ; in short , of any real variety with such limited means , has necessarily driven the purveyors into monotonous repetitions and excesses . The Siege of Rochelle , with the exception of one or two pleasing melodies , was a raree-show with a bombardment of musical instruments : the Bronze
Horse was a much finer show ; the Jewess finer still , and more of it ; Chevy Chase finer than all , because made up of all . After each of these had ceased to draw , which was soon the case , and very naturally , it became necessary , in pursuance of the diseased principles of present managers , to give two or three such pieces in one night . The public has therefore been
frequently-regaled at one sitting with the Bronze Horse , the Pantomime , and the Jewess ; or such things as the Siege of Rochelle , the Bronze Horse , and Chevy Chase ; the successive pieces appearing only like the same thing , viz : —a splendidly dis connected , and interminably uninteresting pantomime , which isent everybody home with exhausted senses , a splitting headache , a feverish pulse , and not one acquisition worthy a future thought . These raree-shows are brought out at immense
Untitled Article
9 & £ Indestructibility 4 > f the Drama .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1836, page 332, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2658/page/4/
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