Our audiences come to the theatre to be complimented on their goodness.

They compare notes with the amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful sympathy of disposition between them.

We have a common stock of dramatic morality, out of which a writer may be supplied without the trouble of copying it from originals within his own breast.

To know the boundaries of honor, to be judiciously valiant, to have a temperance which shall beget a smoothness in the angry swellings of youth, to esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputation of a parent is to be defended, yet to shake and tremble under a pious cowardice when that ark of an honest confidence is found to be frail and tottering, to feel the true blows of a real disgrace blunting that sword which the imaginary strokes of a supposed false imputation had put so keen an edge upon but lately; to do, or to imagine this done, in a feigned story, asks something more of a moral sense, somewhat a greater delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong, than goes to the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of honor as opposed to the laws of the land, or a commonplace against duelling.

Yet such things would stand a writer now-a-days in far better stead than Captain Agar and his conscientious honor; and he would be considered as a far better teacher of morality than old Rowley or Middleton, if they were living.
* * * * * WILLIAM ROWLEY.
_A New Wonder; a Woman never Vext_ .-- The old play-writers are distinguished by an honest boldness of exhibition,--they show everything without being ashamed.