Excerpt from The Sign of the Cross To purify tho stage, that the stage might raise men, to go straight to the source of high emotion, to bring together the old and the new natures till each told the truth of the other, to bring the nineteenth century face to face with the first, - this seemed to me heroic. And the more so, because great actors and good men said it was impossible, for the English playgoer was best caught with broad pieces and the things which he would condemn in the real life of his own home. Many a tragedian preferred the things that make for good, but their audience seemed of another mind. We only seemed so; at the bottom of our hearts all the time there was a scorn of base thoughts, and a kindling to whatever is pure and true and honourable and lovely, although we did not always know it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.