constitution both in church and state. Some of these Some of these persons fatally entangled themselves in intrigues and faction; with the intent of saving the constitution they thought it allowable to connect themselves with fanatics and desperados who would have overthrown it, and being taken in the net with them, they perished, like the stork in the fable, for the guilt of their associates. " Neither Charles, nor the most celebrated of his opponents, suspected how many of their secrets would be brought to light by time, and that both would be found seeking support and receiving money from France. Each might have pleaded in excuse the conduct of the other. The motive for the king's conduct would probably have been found in that part of his character wherein he resembled king William—a man in all other points so dissimilar, his disregard for any thing farther than as it related to himself; for William confessed, he did not care what became of the world when he was out of it. When Charles II. covenanted with Louis XIV. that he would re-establish the Catholic religion in England, it is more consistent with his temper, and his total want of principle, to suppose that his sole motive was to obtain money from France for his own wanton expenditure, than that he had the slightest intention of making so perilous an attempt. He said to Sir John Reresby, I know it is said I cim at the subversion of the government and religion; that I intend to lay aside parliaments and to raise money another way; but all men, nay those who insist the most thereon, know the thing in all its circumstances to be false. There e is not a subject that lives under me whose safety and welfare I desire less than my own; and I should be as sorry to invade his liberty and property, as that another should invade mine,' None of the open measures of his government belied these protestations. In his secret treaty with France he seems to have acted upon the principle of public faith which Louis explains to his son; but so far was he from acting in observance of that treaty, that at his death (we are told) he advised James not to venture upon the dangerous and impracticable attempt of introducing the Romish religion into England. With regard to his own religion, Wellwood may be believed when he says that it was deism, or rather that which is called so;' and that if at his death he went into that of Rome,' it is to be imputed to a lazy diffidence in all other religions, upon a review of his past life, and the near approach of an uncertain state." The agitations of this reign were the natural effect of the convulsions in the preceding one, as the swell continues after the tempest has ceased. The public and private profligacy which had gained head during the rebellion prevailed to such a degree that did we estimate the age only from its history and its literature, it would seem almost miraculous that the nation should not have sunk sunk into that utter degeneracy which necessarily terminates in national ruin. What must have been the standard of honour in an age when we had Bennet and Lauderdale for ministers, Scroggs and Jefferies for judges, and Buckingham and Shaftesbury for patriots; when the French king had both the king of England and the most illustrious of the English whigs in his pay? Where would then have been the liberties of England if the monarch had been like Henry VII. or the minister like Strafford? Or where the monarchy, if among its enemies there had been men with the subtlety of Vane and St. John, the courage and eloquence of Pym, the strength of character and the self-controul of Hampden? It is an observation of Sir William Temple that some ages produce many great men, and few great occasions; other times, on the contrary, raise great occasions, and few or no great men. And that sometimes happens in a country, which was said by the fool of Brederode, who going about the fields with the motions of one sowing corn, was asked what he sowed? he said, 'I sow fools:t'other replied, "why do you not sow wise men ? why,' said the fool, c'est que la terre ne les porte pas." They who tell us that' revolutions produce great men, speak hastily and without either reflection or foresight. Produce them they do, but it is in a Scourging crop which exhausts the soil that bears it they call forth the strong and stirring spirits which were nurtured in better times; and they train up no great men to succeed them. Great characters are brought forward in distempered times, but it is in' peaceable ones that they must be formed. "Tis not in battles that from youth we train... with the be wise and good, sternness of the brain Thoughts and meek as womanhood. Wisdom doth live with children round her knees: We have been so long together bad Englishmen,' says Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, that we had no leisure to be good poets. The fury of a civil war, and power for twenty years together abandoned to a barbarous race of men, enemies of all good learning, had buried the muses under the rains of monarchy. He thought that the Restoration had inmediately repaired this evil, whereas the fine literature of this country suffered more from the taste and morals which Charles and his followers imported, than it had done during all the preceding storms. It was when the thea tres tres were opened that Dryden fancied revived poesy' was to be seen lifting up its head and shaking off the rubbish which lay so heavy on it. Yet in the theatre it was that the corruption of intellect and feeling was first and most apparent. A year only after the restoration, Evelyn writes in his Diary, 'I saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played, but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his majesty's being so long abroad.' A few years afterwards he observes, that he went very seldom to the public theatres for many reasons now, as they were abused to an atheistical liberty; foul and indecent women now (and never till now) permitted to appear and act, who, inflaming several young noblemen and gallants, became their misses, and to some their wives; witness the Earl of Oxford, Sir R. Howard, Prince Rupert, the Earl of Dorset, and another greater person than any of them, who fell into their snares, to the reproach of their noble families and ruin of both body and soul.' Prynne had paid with his ears for railing against dramatic representations: how must he have pricked up their stumps in the days of his sober repentance, at hearing in every comedy enough to justify the bitterest of his invectives, and make him imagine he had been possessed by a spirit of prophecy as well as a spirit of sedition! Well indeed might such men as Evelyn cease to frequent the theatres when Shakspeare and Jonson were supplanted by Dryden and Shadwell, and when it was openly declared from the stage that the actresses were willing to practise the lessons of brothelry, which it seemed the main object of the drama to inculcate; so that the playhouses were literally, what Burnet calls them, nests of prostitution. When he adds that Drydeu, the great master of dramatic poesy, was a monster of immodesty and impurity of all sorts,' the bishop betrays his own vitiated taste and his political animosity, for Dryden's plays, bad as they are, are not worse than those of his contemporaries, and his life was at least decorous. This was the case also with Shadwell, his rival; for such is the blindness of faction, that Shadwell was extolled by the Whigs as a rival to Dryden. There is a thorough profligacy in his comedies, not of expressions alone and actions, but of sentiments and opinions, deliberately delivered by his gentlemen of wit and sense,' as their principle of conduct: yet he is said to have been irreproachable in his private life, and actually took credit to himself for the morality of his writings! His executors would even haye eulogized him in his epitaph as one who had employed his talents for correcting the vices of the age; but the dean and chapter refused to let such an encomium be set up in the church. Westminster Abbey was sufficiently degraded when they allowed the bust of this vile writer, crowned with laurel, a place among the tombs of the poets! The The opinion which Shadwell entertained of himself as a moral writer was not more preposterous than the complacency with which he advanced his literary pretensions. It seems as if he was incapable of distinguishing between his own brass and the gold of his predecessors, when they were placed side by side. He says, in the preface to his Psyche,* I will be bold to affirm, that this is as much a play as could be made upon this subject;' whereas nothing móre base and worthless than the lines in which he has berhymed it was ever sung at Vauxhall or printed in the Lady's Magazines and pocket books of former times. Borrowing a play from Molière, and of course injuring it by every alteration, he makes the modest assertion,' without vanity, that Molière's part has not suffered in his hands.' Shakspeare, he says, never made more masterly strokes than in Timon of Athens, yet,' he adds, 'I can truly say. I have made it into a play.' This he has done by introducing two female characters, the one a mistress, whom Timon is about to cast off, in order to take a wife, the other his intended bride; the latter jilts him in his misfortunes, the former follows him in private at his death, and kills herself for grief. As a specimen of the linsey-woolsey with which this botcher has pieced the mantle of Shakspeare, the concluding speech of Alcibiades is here transcribed. 1 Poor Timon! I once knew thee the most flourishing man Of all th' Athenians; and thou still hadst been so Had not these smiling flattering knaves devoured thee And murdered thee with base ingratitude. His death pull'd on the poor Evandra's too, Now all repair to their respective homes, Their several trades, their business and diversions; And may its wealth and power e'er increase.' The writer who could compose such lines as these, and be satisfied with them, would certainly be capable of thinking he had made Timon of Athens into a play! And yet that assertion exemplifies the state of public taste, as much as the presumption and obtuseness of the individual. The veriest rhymesters of the age thought themselves as competent to improve Shakspeare, as a French painter does to retouch or even paint over the compositions of the great Italian masters. And this presumption was not confined to such authors as Shadwell and his successor in the They who cannot read this story (the most beautiful which antiquity has left us) in the prose of Apuleius, and some of those who can also, may thank us for recommending it to them in the verse of Mr. Hudson Gurney. laurel, laurel, Nahum Tate (of whom, for want of any thing better to eulogize, it has been recorded that he was a free, good-natured, fuddling companion)—men of a better mold, and worthy of a better age, were guilty of the same profanation. Davenant and Dryden joined in the unworthy office of adapting Shakspeare's Tempest to the taste of Charles the Second's court; and Dryden's rhymed play upon Paradise Lost remains a still more flagrant proof how deeply the spirit of the times had tainted him. Dryden had persuaded himself that English poetry had not reached its vigour and maturity in the age of Shakspeare! that our language had received great improvements since his time, and that even the art of versification had not been understood, till it was introduced by Waller! He affirms that Shakspeare frequently fell into a lethargy of thought, and he ascribed the superiority of the dramatic writers of his own age over that of Elizabeth and James's days, to what was, in reality, the most efficient cause of their utter degeneracy. I must freely, and without flattery,' he says, ' ascribe it to the court; and in it particularly to the king, whose example gives a law to it. His own misfortunes and the nation's afforded him an opportunity, which is rarely allowed to sovereign princes, I mean of travelling and being conversant in the most polished courts of Europe; and thereby of cultivating a spirit which was formed by nature to receive the impressions of a gallant and generous education. At his return he found a nation lost as much in barbarism as in rebellion. And as the excellency of his nature forgave the one, so the excellency of his manners reformed the other. The desire of imitating so great a pattern first wakened the dull and heavy spirits of the English from their natural reservedness; loosened them from their stiff forms of conversation, and made them easy and pliant to each other in discourse. Thus insensibly our way of living became more free; and the fire of the English wit, which was before stifled under a constrained melancholy way of breeding, began first to display its force, by mixing the solidity of our nation with the art and gaiety of our neighbours. This being granted to be true, it would be a wonder if the poets, whose work is imitation, should be the only persons in three kingdoms who should not receive advantage by it.' The stage forming itself to the taste and manners of such a court contributed, as far as its influence extended, to the general corruption. 'He that frequents plays,' said John Dunton,' sports on the devil's ground; and if he dies on the spot, the devil, as lord of the manor, has a right to him.' This was said in the spirit of Prynne, and of those old Waldenses who taught that a dance was the devil's church-service, and that all the ten commandments were broken by the act of dancing. Nor was it among the Puritans alone that the extreme |