Page:Republican Court by Rufus Griswold.djvu/250

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

212

THE REPUBLICAN COURT.

and the profligacy of actors are constantly asserted, but who is so blind as not to see that the withdrawal of the religious and servilely formal and nominally virtuous, from an inevitable institution, will pervert it, and deprave it, and make it injurious to society, while a more kindly guardianship might render it a conservator of morality and refinement, as well as a most delightful and rational means of intellectual recreation? The parent of innumerable superstitions, and of all heresies ever in the churches the most injurious to true rehgion, is the belief that self-denial is in itself a virtue, — that Simeon Stylites, "from scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin," deserved canonization for withdrawing from the pleasant pathways of the world to "chatter with the cold," and "disown the whoopings of the owl with sound of pious hymns and psalms," upon his column. Undoubtedly we are never to consider our ease or the satisfaction of our natural desires a moment in comparison with the love and obedience we owe to God, or the affectionate justice due to our fellow-men, or any exhibition of the attractive beauty of holiness; but the Creator and all his works continually urge us to enjoy, all that is enjoyable in innocence, and denounce every avoidance or interdiction of reasonable happiness as crime. No means of pleasure has ever been devised more dignified and worthy of a fine intelligence, than that of the fit exhibition on the stage of the noblest and most universally appreciable productions of genius; and it is a valuable portion of the faultless example^[1] of Washington, which displays his approval of such exercise of our

↑ The President not only attended the theatre in John street, but he had "private theatricals" in his own house. President Duer says, "I was not only frequently admitted to the presence of this most august of men, in propria persona, but once had the honor of appearing before him as one of the dramatis personæ in the tragedy of Julius Cæsar, enacted by a young 'American Company,' (the theatrical corps then performing in New York being called the 'Old American Company,') in the garret of the Presidential mansion, where, before the magnates of the land and the élite of the city, I performed the part of Brutus to the Cassius of my old schoolfellow, Washington Custis, who still survives in the enjoyment of health, wealth, and the fame of his family alliance, with any thing but the 'lean and hungry look' attributed to his fictitious character."

[1] The President not only attended the theatre in John street, but he had "private theatricals" in his own house. President Duer says, "I was not only frequently admitted to the presence of this most august of men, in propria persona, but once had the honor of appearing before him as one of the dramatis personæ in the tragedy of Julius Cæsar, enacted by a young 'American Company,' (the theatrical corps then performing in New York being called the 'Old American Company,') in the garret of the Presidential mansion, where, before the magnates of the land and the élite of the city, I performed the part of Brutus to the Cassius of my old schoolfellow, Washington Custis, who still survives in the enjoyment of health, wealth, and the fame of his family alliance, with any thing but the 'lean and hungry look' attributed to his fictitious character."

[1]