an interest in dramatic training, as the best means of modulating voice and action into their most effective display. This commencing intervention was to be limited to one great experiment for the metropolis, in the expectation that private enterprise would follow the example elsewhere.
All this dramatic enterprise was not immediately, although it was eventually, successful; and thus this trust, by itself, might have pecuniarily failed, but for the averaging system which was applied to such lesser or more precarious trusts. Either several such trusts, of varying financial prospects, were bound financially together, so as to afford an improved chance for the eventual solvency of the whole, or, in the last resort, any lingering case might be tacked on, as a second charge, to some other of surer prospects, as was so successfully done with the old London municipality debt.
Theatrical exhibitions never inconsistent with good taste, and a theatrical troupe every individual of which was a respectable member of society, and everywhere acknowledged and received as such—no less than all this was the aim and object of this novel trial of a trust. The scale of things in all the appointments of this national recreative department was commensurate alike with a due sense of the importance of the object, and of the possible magnitude of the audiences to be afterwards dealt with. We owed much of subsequent dramatic progress to the excellent influences thus brought to bear upon dramatic life. Acting became even a favourite recreation of the young of both sexes, and indeed more or less of a disciplinary educational training. The
