of or remembered, the tremendous and overwhelming denunciation-" Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels !" shall awaken the fashionables from their refined and delicate slumbers !-shall plunge them and their false teachers, into one common, dark and eternal ruin.

But to return from this digression, if it be one. The principal difference between the Circus and the Theatre is, that in the Theatre bipeds, generally speaking, are the sole actors; latterly, however, the rule has been somewhat relaxed, by the admission of the Dog of Montargis, and the Horse of Mazeppa; and we believe also, that the march of intellect in the dramatic world, has recently been so rapid and successful, that the Elephant has more than once been made to tread the stage; and if so, the stage, we admit, has exhibited a much graver and more sagacious animal than many of those who have heretofore been in the habit of treading it. The next novelty, we presume, will be the introduction of the Ourang Outang; this will cap the climax of dramatic glory, and gratify, perhaps, to the full, the growing taste and discrimination of the theatre-going multitude! But be this as it may, while bipeds generally have been the sole actors at the Theatre, in the Circus quadrupeds and quadrumanoes have taken the lead. Here, in

the Circus, horses, lamas, baboons and monkeys, show off their agility and their broad grins, for the edification of babes and sucklings in science; whilst in the Theatre, mock kings, mock queens, mock dukes, and in short mock dandies of all sorts and sizes, do more or less of the same silly things, with the addition of singing and spouting, which we do not so often meet with at the Circus, except the spouting of the clown, which has one advantage over that of the players; it is his own homespun stuff, whether good or bad of the kind. We must except, too, his broad grins, and those of his accomplished auxiliaries, Mumbo and Jacko: And then again, the crack of his whip is at least as loud if not as long, and certainly as edifying to a rational mind, as the crack songs at the Theatre; such, for example, as Jim Crow, which has lately made the fortune of its author in the land where Milton sold the copy-right of his imperishable work, the first fruit of his immortal genius, for five pounds! Well might Shakspeare, or somebody else, no matter who, exclaim-" Oh! flesh, how art thou fishified!" The bare fact, that the author and actor of Jim Crow, has made his fortune, first, we believe, here, and next in England, by the composition and exhibition of such stuff as Jim Crow is made of, is proof conclusive, that the American people have lost, if they ever pos

sessed them, and the English people are far from having gained, the habits and principles essential to the preservation of a rational system of civil, political and religious liberty; or, in other words, that it is as hard for this people to preserve, as it is for the English people to acquire, an enlightened republican spirit. No people so besotted, so lost to the genuine principles of morality and religion, as to cherish such peurile and contemptible exhibitions, have either wisdom or virtue enough to gain or preserve freedom: For it is in vain-it is an empty soundto talk of freedom without sound morality and true religion; and it is equally vain to talk of sound morality and true religion, where genius, virtue and piety often pine in obscurity and want, while demagogues, quacks, mountebanks, and crack songsters, wallow in wealth and triumph in popularity!

Another advantage which the Circus has over the Theatre, is, that as the eye, and not the ear, is the organ of gratification, spectators may go in or out at pleasure, without the least breach of that decorum or good breeding, which must of course belong to the "good society" that is met with at such places; and moreover, nothing that is acted by the horses or their riders, the clown or the baboons and monkeys, since it is all dumb-show, is so likely to corrupt the morals

or manners of the youth who witness it, as what they meet with at the Theatre. The dangerand a fearful one it is-lies in the lazy and vagrant habits contracted by visiting such a resort of idleness and folly.

And is it not, my young readers, a sublime spectacle-worthy of being patronized by all sublime geniuses-to behold a strapping, lazy fellow, who might be a very useful and respec table man at the tail of a plough, or in a carpen, ter's shop, or a ship-yard, with a broad-axe or a jack-plane in his hand is it not, we say, a most edifying and laudable scene, to behold such a worthy, riding round a circus upon the back of a horse, standing with one foot only in the saddle; or, to excite the greater surprise of the gaping audience, with his head in the saddle, and his legs dangling in the air; while behind him comes perhaps a baboon or a monkey, mounted on a jackass or a lama, and imitating the antics of the degraded biped on horse-back! What an instructive and delectable spectacle! And how worthy of the noble spirited youth of a christian republic! Had the godly and glorious men-the immortal pioneers of liberty and religion in this new world-who landed on Plymouth rock, foreseen that their posterity would thus disgrace their memories, what would have been the anguish of their minds! They would have H*

given up their noble enterprise, and returned to England; preferring martyrdom or the scaffold there, to the consciousness that they were destined to give birth to a race of dandies, slaves and tyrants here! For dandies, slaves and tyrants we shall inevitably become, and that too at no very distant day, if the morals, manners, habits and customs, which we have borrowed from pagan Rome, and degenerate modern Europe, be persisted in. They will, if not speedily eradicated, grow with our growth, and strengthen with our strength, till our country will become one universal mass of degeneracy and corruption, and will sink into absolute despotism.

This is one view of all the idle and vicious amusements in which we indulge so much, which ought to cause every patriot in the land-if there be any real patriots left in it-to exert himself for their total extirpation. They have already made thousands of drunkards, debauchees, and vagabonds, of young men, who might have been the ornaments of their country, and the benefactors of their species. They have undoubtedly been the main causes of exciting among us an almost universal spirit of luxury and laziness; or, in other words, a disposition in the minds of thousands and tens of thousands to live without work; and in lieu of it to run into all sorts of extravagant, heedless and un