text:  Why should not the State interpose to prevent the sale of poison on the stage as in the streets? Why should it not offer prizes and honours for great tragedies and comedies as soon as it would for a voyage to the Arctic or Antarctic? But is dramatic genius dead in England? What in England! where nothing dies--where every faculty of the heart and understanding is in the most perpetual activity--where the noblest impulses are perpetually pushing forward to the noblest ends--where human nature moves in all its vigour from hour to hour without disguise--where the whole anatomy of the moral frame is visible and all its weakness and all its wonders are the daily spectacle of all mankind! In giving these opinions of the powers of the stage need I guard them by saying that I contemplate a higher spirit than the drama even of Shakspeare has ever displayed--one which to the vigour of his characters and the splendours of his poetry should add a moral of which his time was scarcely conscious? My idea would approach more nearly the objects of the great Greek dramas in which the first sympathies of the people were appealed to by the most powerful recollections of historic virtue; their national victories over the Persian the lofty conceptions of their Olympus the glories of their national power and the prospects of their imperishable renown