The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott: Containing Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Sir Tristrem, and Dramatic Pieces (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott: Containing Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Sir Tristrem, and Dramatic Pieces

The theatre affords the most appropriate example of what we mean. The first circles in society are open to persons eminently distinguished in the drama; and their rewards are, in proportion to those who profess the useful arts, in calculably higher. But those who lag in the rear of the dramatic art, are proportionally poorer and more degraded than those who are the lowest of a useful trade or prores sion. These instances will enable as readily to explain why the greater part of the minstrels, practising their profession in scenes of vulgar mirth and debauchery, bumbling their art to please the ears of drunken clowns, and living with the dissipation natural to men whose precarious subsistence is, according to the ordinary phrase, from hand to month only, should fall under general contempt, while the stars of the profession. To use a modern phrase, looked down on them from the distant empyrean, as the planets do upon those shooting exhalations arising from gross vapours in the nether atmosphere.

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