necessity fell to the ground. Those who were obliged to reject the
ridiculous legends which invested the whole of their Pantheon, together
with the fabulous adjudgers of future punishments, could not but dismiss
the punishments, which were, in fact, as laughable, and as obviously the
fictions of human ingenuity, as their dispensers. In short, the civilized
part of the world in those days lay in this dreadful condition; their
intellect had far outgrown their religion; the disproportions between the
two were at length become monstrous; and as yet no purer or more elevated
faith was prepared for their acceptance. The case was as shocking as if,
with our present intellectual needs, we should be unhappy enough to have
no creed on which to rest the burden of our final hopes and fears, of our
moral obligations, and of our consolations in misery, except the fairy
mythology of our nurses. The condition of a people so situated, of a
people under the calamity of having outgrown its religious faith, has
never been sufficiently considered. It is probable that such a condition
has never existed before or since that era of the world. The consequences
to Rome were--that the reasoning and disputatious part of her population
took refuge from the painful state of doubt in Atheism; amongst the
thoughtless and irreflective the consequences were chiefly felt in their
morals, which were thus sapped in their foundation.

3. A third cause, which from the first had exercised a most baleful
influence upon the arts and upon literature in Rome, had by this time
matured its disastrous tendencies towards the extinction of the moral
sensibilities. This was the circus, and the whole machinery, form and
substance, of the Circensian shows. Why had tragedy no existence as a part
of the Roman literature? Because--and _that_ was a reason which would
have sufficed to stifle all the dramatic genius of Greece and England--
there was too much tragedy in the shape of gross reality, almost daily
before their eyes. The amphitheatre extinguished the theatre. How was it