ance with their feelings, as we do not hear a word of suppressing the office of master of the revels, whose express original employment was to arrange the scenic and pastoral amusements of the Court, which was afterwards extended to the licensing plays out of its verge.

Were we to form an opinion of the morals of any particular period by one single circumstance, it would appear, that the age of Elizabeth and that of her successor had a high sense of the propriety which ought to attach to the female character, as no female had then appeared upon the stage.

A very warm and a very learned controversy took place between Dr. Gager and Master Rainoldes, respecting the Theatre and its attendant consequences: the latter maintained, that theatrical performances were vicious and improper in every point of view; the former, who had written several plays, was as ardent in their defence: and, it seems, the origin of the dispute was the custom still continued at Westminster School, where the youth, in imitation of the antient practice of the Universities, act the plays of Terence. Gager had felt himself injured by some of the expressions of his opponent; and the latter observes, "Yea, although you say it grieveth them not a little, that they should in private, but much more in public, be charged with infamy, I believe and hope

hope so much the better of them: knowing that there is a grief to repentance, which the Lord worketh in his by such reproofs; and it was well with Peter when he wept bitterly. Wherefore, having this perswasion of your players, even of them for whose parts I charged plays most, namely, Hippodamia, Melantho, the nymph Phædra and her nurse; if I should have noted them as infamous; them, I say, not their parts; these plays, and not players; I should have taken on me the judgment that belongeth unto the Searcher of hearts and reins, and spoken against mine own conscience; which, if you have made them believe I love them so ill, by reason of the bad conceit I have of them, that I would do of spite and malice to discredit them: yet, let me entreat them to think I love myself better, than that I would through their sides wound mine own, who, when I was about the age that they are, sixand-twenty years since, did play a woman's part upon the same stage, the part of Hypolita."

This moralist would have been miserable indeed had he lived to witness the conduct of certain shameless females, who have disgraced the stage, since his time; if he severely reproved the master and students of a college, for the former permitting the latter to appear in the dress, and utter the sentiments, of a woman, what would have been his feelings had he heard the licentious

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speeches composed by Dryden, Mrs. Behn, and others, pronounced by a Woffington, &c. &c.

Another cause of complaint against Gager was, the performance of the plays alluded to on Sunday evenings; from which the author digresses to the non-resident clergy, who, he hints, encouraged this description of amusement. "Those idle pastors of the church, evil beasts, and slow bellies, who have mouths and speak not, eyes and see not, feet and go not, who feed themselves and not their flocks."

The court was extremely partial to splendid amusements; it is, therefore, not to be wondered at, that the manners of James and his consort had their advocates. Wilson says, in his life of that Monarch, the Court was a continued maskarado, where the Queen" and her ladies, like so many sea-nymphs or Nereides, appeared often in various dresses, to the ravishment of the beholder: the King himself being not a little delighted with such fluent elegances as made the nights more glorious than the days.”

Were we doubtful on the subject before, whether the grave and learned professors of the common law delighted in the common amusements of the world, Prynne would remove those doubts by his charging them with the "evil custom and worse example of admitting common actors and interludes upon their two grand festivals to recre

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ate themselves withal, notwithstanding the statute of our kingdom (of which lawyers, of all others, should be most observant) have branded all professed stage-players for infamous rogues, and stageplays for unlawful pastimes, especially on Lord's days, and other solemn holidays, on which these grand days ever fall." An assertion in this writer's dedication renders it a matter of no surprize that lawyers were seduced into a partiality for the stage, as it must have been pretty general, if his stationer informed him truly, that "above forty thousand play books" had been printed within the two preceding years; which must indeed have found more purchasers than the choicest sermons, if the copies were all sold within a reasonable period. This demand will be in some degree accounted for, when it is remembered, there were .then six theatres in London, and that the city and suburbs did not occupy one-fourth of the present extent. The Fortune and Red Bull were at that time re-built and enlarged, and the White Friars theatre was just erected.

The then moralists, it seems, universally rejected the public stage. Those performances, purely academical, and acted by the students and others, permitted by heads of colleges, they thought, might be tolerated, provided no obscenity, scurrility, profaneness, amorous love toys, wantonness, or effeminacy, was obtruded on the spectators; and

and provided they contained no female characters, and the consequent customs of clippings or embracements, invocations of heathen gods and goddesses, the appearance of males in female attire or rich dresses, that they were seldom represented, and always in Latin, gratis. It would be folly and injustice for a modern admirer of theatrical exhibitions to reject all that Prynne asserts in his "Histrio-mastix," 1633, as fanatical 'prejudice and spleen, as he really pointed out many gross and shocking abuses, in speaking of the profaneness of the English stage, which were overlooked or not observed by the mass of the publick. Indeed, the blasphemy of it, "a sin too frequent," he observes, " in our modern stageplays, where these dreadful names (to our shame, plays ruin be it written) are most desperately profaned, most atheistically blasphemed. Witness our own late religious statute of tertio Jacobi, chapter 21, where our Sovereign Lord the King, together with the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons in that Parliament assembled, for the preventing and avoiding of the great abuse of the holy name of God in stage-plays and interludes, which then grew common, enacted this pious law (which is seldom or never put in execution, because few else but such who delight in blasphemy, and therefore are unlikely to prove informers against it, resort to stage-plays), that if

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