In reference to the poorer classes, we all lament the wide prevalence of intemperate drinking.  Well, is it not an obvious reflection that the worst performance seen on any of our stages cannot be so bad as drinking for a corresponding time in a gin-palace?  I have pointed this contrast before, and I point it again.  The drinking we deplore takes place in company—­bad company; it is enlivened by talk—­bad talk.  It is relished by obscenity.  Where drink and low people come together these things must be.  The worst that can come of stage pandering to the corrupt tastes of its basest patrons cannot be anything like this, and, as a rule, the stage holds out long against the invitation to pander; and such invitations, from the publicity and decorum that attend the whole matter, are neither frequent nor eager.  A sort of decency sets in upon the coarsest person in entering even the roughest theatre.  I have sometimes thought that, considering the liability to descend and the facility of descent, a special Providence watches over the morals and tone of our English stage.  I do not desire to overcharge the eulogy.  There never was a time when the stage had not conspicuous faults.  There never was a time when these were not freely admitted by those most concerned for the maintenance of the stage at its best.  In Shakespeare, whenever the subject of the theatre is approached, we perceive signs that that great spirit, though it had a practical and business-like vein, and essayed no impossible enterprises, groaned under the necessities, or the demands of a public which desired frivolities and deformities which jarred upon the poet-manager’s feelings.  As we descend the course of time we find that each generation looked back to a supposed previous period when taste ranged higher, and when the inferior and offensive peculiarities of the existing stage were unknown.  Yet from most of these generations we inherit works as well as traditions and biographical recollections which the world will never let die.  The truth is that the immortal part of the stage is its nobler part.  Ignoble accidents and interludes come and go, but this lasts on forever.  It lives, like the human soul, in the body of humanity—­associated with much that is inferior, and hampered by many hindrances—­but it never sinks into nothingness, and never fails to find new and noble work in creations of permanent and memorable excellence.  Heaven forbid that I should seem to cover, even with a counterpane of courtesy, exhibitions of deliberate immorality.  Happily this sort of thing is not common, and although it has hardly been practised by any one who, without a strain of meaning can be associated with the profession of acting, yet public censure, not active enough to repress the evil, is ever ready to pass a sweeping condemnation on the stage which harbors it.  Our cause is a good one.  We go forth, armed with the luminous panoply which genius has forged for us, to do battle with dulness, with coarseness, with apathy, with every