century. Can we wonder that thinking men should have seen a connexion between Italy and the stage? Certainly the playwrights put themselves between the horns of an ugly dilemma. Either the vices which they depicted were those of general English society, and of themselves also (for they lived in the very heart of town and court foppery); or else they were the vices of a foreign country, with which the English were comparatively unacquainted. In the first case, we can only say, that the Stuart age in England was one which deserved purgation of the most terrible kind, and to get rid of which the severest and most abnormal measures would have been not only justifiable, but, to judge by the experience of all history, necessary; for extraordinary diseases never have been, and never will be, eradicated save by extraordinary medicines. In the second case, the playwrights were wantonly defiling the minds of the people, and instead of 'holding up a mirror to vice,' instructing frail virtue in vices which she had not learned, and fully justifying old Prynne's indignant complaint:

The acting of foreign, obsolete, and long since forgotten villanies on the stage, is so far from working a detestation of them in the spectators' minds (who, perchance, were utterly ignorant of them, till they were acquainted with them at the play-house, and so needed no dehortation from them), that it often excites dangerous dunghill spirits, who have nothing in them for to make them eminent, to reduce them into practice, of purpose to perpetuate their spurious ill-serving memories to posterity, leastwise in some tragic interlude.

That Prynne spoke herein nought but sober sense, our own police-reports will sufficiently prove. It is

notorious that the representation, in our own days, of 'Tom and Jerry' and of 'Jack Sheppard,' did excite dozens of young lads to imitate the heroes of those dramas; and such must have been the effect of similar and worse representations in the Stuart age. No rational man will need the authority of Bishop Babington, Doctor Leighton, Archbishop Parker, Purchas, Sparkes, Reynolds, White, or any one else, Churchman or Puritan, prelate or 'penitent reclaimed play-poet,' like Stephen Gosson, to convince him that, as they assert, citizens' wives (who are generally represented as the proper subjects for seduction) 'have, even on their deathbeds, with tears confessed that they have received, at these spectacles, such evil infections as have turned their minds from chaste cogitations, and made them, of honest women, light huswives; . . . have brought their husbands into contempt, their children into question,

. . and their souls into the assault of a dangerous state;' or that 'The devices of carrying and re-carrying letters by laundresses, practising with pedlars to transport their tokens by colorable means to sell their merchandise, and other kinds of policies to beguile fathers of their children, husbands of their wives, guardians of their wards, and masters of their servants, were aptly taught in these schools of abuse.'

The matter is simple enough. We should not allow these plays to be acted in our own day, because we know that they would produce their effects. We should

*The Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theatres.' Penned by a Play-poet.

call him a madman who allowed his daughters or his servants to see such representations. Why, in all fairness, were the Puritans wrong in condemning that which we now have absolutely forbidden?

We will go no further into the details of the licentiousness of the old play-houses. Gosson, and his colleague the anonymous Penitent, assert them, as does Prynne, to have been not only schools but ante-chambers to houses of a worse kind, and that the lessons learned in the pit were only not practised also in the pit. What reason have we to doubt it, who know that till Mr. Macready commenced a practical reformation of this abuse, for which his name will be ever respected, our own comparatively purified stage was just the same? Let any one who remembers the saloons of Drury Lane and Covent Garden thirty years ago judge for himself what the accessories of the Globe or the Fortune must have been, in days when players were allowed to talk inside, as freely as the public behaved outside.

Not that the poets or the players had any conscious intention of demoralizing their hearers, any more than they had of correcting them. We will lay on them the blame of no special 'malus animus:' but, at the same time, we must treat their fine words about 'holding a mirror up to vice,' and 'showing the age its own deformity,' as mere cant, which the men themselves must have spoken tongue in cheek. It was as much an in

* This was written sixteen years ago. We have become since then more amenable to the influences of French civilization.

sincere cant in those days as it was when, two generations later, Jeremy Collier exposed its falsehood in the mouth of Congreve. If the poets had really intended to show ice its own deformity, they would have represented it (as Shakspeare always does) as punished, and not as triumphant. It is ridiculous to talk of moral purpose in works in which there is no moral justice. The only condition which can excuse the representation of evil is omitted. The simple fact is, that the poets wanted to draw a house; that this could most easily be done by the coarsest and most violent means; and that not being often able to find stories exciting enough in the past records of sober English society, they went to Italy and Spain for the violent passions and wild crimes of southern temperaments, excited, and yet left lawless, by a superstition believed in enough to darken and brutalize, but not enough to control, its victims. Those were the countries which just then furnished that strange mixture of inward savagery with outward civilization, which is the immoral playwright's fittest material; because, while the inward savagery moves the passions of the audience, the outward civilization brings the character near enough to them to give them a likeness of themselves in their worst moments, such as no Mystery of Cain or Tragedy of Prometheus can give.

Does this seem too severe in the eyes of those who value the drama for its lessons in human nature? On that special point something must be said hereafter. Meanwhile, hear one of the sixteenth century poets; one who cannot be suspected of any leaning toward

Puritanism; one who had as high notions of his vocation as any man; and one who so far fulfilled those notions as to become a dramatist inferior only to Shakspeare. Let Ben Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to Volpone,' tell us in his own noble prose, what he thought of the average morality of his contemporary playwrights :

For if men will impartially and not asquint look toward the offices and functions of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man's being a good poet, without first being a good man. He that is said to be able to inform young men to all good discipline, inflame grown men to all great virtues, keep old men in their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood, recover them to their first strength; that comes forth the interpreter and arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less than human, a master in manners; and can alone (or with a few) effect the business of mankind; this, I take him, is no subject for pride and ignorance to exercise their railing rhetoric upon. But it will here be hastily answered, that the writers of these days are other things, that not only their manners but their natures are inverted, and nothing remaining of them of the dignity of poet but the abused name, which every scribe usurps; that now, especially in dramatick, or (as they term it) stage poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation, blasphemies, all licence of offence toward God and man is practised. I dare not deny a great part of this (and I am sorry I dare not), because in some men's abortive features (and would God they had never seen the light!) it is over true; but that all are bound on his bold adventure for hell, is a most uncharitable thought, and uttered, a more malicious slander. For every particular I can (and from a most clear conscience) affirm, that I have ever trembled to think toward the least profaneness, and have loathed the use of such foul and unwashed [his expression

is too strong for quotation] as is now made the food of the scene.

It is a pity to curtail this splendid passage, both for its lofty ideal of poetry, and for its corroboration of the Puritan complaints against the stage: but a few lines on, a still stronger sentence occurs :--