On Tragical Representations, 321 
ascribed their hardiness in war to this familiarity 
with blood and death in the amphitheatre ; and 
a Syrian monarch, ambitious, at any rate, to 
rival the Roman grandeur, hoped to render his 
effeminate Asiatics equally intrepid and unap- 
palled amidst the horrors of battle, by introduc- 
‘ing the same sanguinary entertainments in peace. 
It is a proof that humanity had little interest in 
the fatal consequences of the Gothic tournaments, 
and bull-fights of the Spaniards, when that sex, 
whom.compassion and an abhorrence from spec- 
tacles of blood may be supposed the last to for- 
sake, was admitted to the most conspicuous seats ; 
as if to gratify them were the chief object of the 
entertainment. All is mad mirth, and drunken 
joy, with an American village, while their cap- 
tive is wasting under their protracted tortures ; 
compassion, or even indifference, would vitiate 
the festival. Humanity may have repelled from, 
but never invited a single guest to the cruel en- 
tertainments of our own nation. It is to that 
polished humanity, which a cultivated philosophy 
anda purer religion have introduced amongst us, 
that we owe the disrepute into which these vulgar 
jollities have at length happily fallen. 
Such representations are, therefore, utterly 
dissimilar, in their effects upon the heart, to the 
representations of tragedy and romance. Hu- 
manity renounces the one, but welcomes the 
other, In those a brutal joy reigns triumphant ; 
