ABSTRACT
The amusements which this place afford are generally supposed the most rational, and are really so to a cultivated mind; yet one that is not quite formed may learn affectation at the theatre. Many of our admired tragedies are too full of declamation, and a false display of the passions. A heroine is often made to grieve ten or twenty years, and yet the unabated sorrow has not given her cheeks a pallid hue; she still inspires the most violent passion in every beholder, and her own yields not to time. The prominent features of a passion are easily / copied, while the more delicate touches are overlooked. That start of Cordelia’s, when her father says, ‘1 think that Lady is my daughter,’a has affected me beyond measure, when I could unmoved hear Calista describe the cave in which she would live ‘Until her tears had washed her guilt away.’b
