possible that the fine and intellectual griefs of the drama should win
their way to hearts seared and rendered callous by the continual
exhibition of scenes the most hideous, in which human blood was poured out
like water, and a human life sacrificed at any moment either to caprice in
the populace, or to a strife of rivalry between the _ayes_ and the
_noes_, or as the penalty for any trifling instance of awkwardness in
the performer himself? Even the more innocent exhibitions, in which brutes
only were the sufferers, could not but be mortal to all the finer
sensibilities. Five thousand wild animals, torn from their native abodes
in the wilderness or forest, were often turned out to be hunted, or for
mutual slaughter, in the course of a single exhibition of this nature; and
it sometimes happened, (a fact which of itself proclaims the course of the
public propensities,) that the person at whose expense the shows were
exhibited, by way of paying special court to the people and meriting their
favor, in the way most conspicuously open to him, issued orders that all,
without a solitary exception, should be slaughtered. He made it known, as
the very highest gratification which the case allowed, that (in the
language of our modern auctioneers) the whole, "without reserve," should
perish before their eyes. Even such spectacles must have hardened the
heart, and blunted the more delicate sensibilities; but these would soon
cease to stimulate the pampered and exhausted sense. From the combats of
tigers or leopards, in which the passions could only be gathered
indirectly, and by way of inference from the motions, the transition must
have been almost inevitable to those of men, whose nobler and more varied
passions spoke directly, and by the intelligible language of the eye, to
human spectators; and from the frequent contemplation of these authorized
murders, in which a whole people, women [Footnote: Augustus, indeed,
strove to exclude the women from one part of the circension spectacles;
and what was that? Simply from the sight of the _Athletae_, as being
naked. But that they should witness the pangs of the dying gladiators, he