extreme profligacy of the theatre excited fear and abhorrence; those sentiments were partaken by all who retained in their manners and habits of mind, any thing of what was called the old Elizabeth way. By all such persons, by the sober and moral part of the nation, the theatre was shunned like a house where the redcross upon the door gave warning that the plague was within. The impurity of the drama was therefore less injurious than if it had been covered with a veil of sentiment; plays at which women who wished to preserve a character for modesty thought it necessary to wear masks, were of course religiously avoided by those who in reality possessed the virtue. The stage did not follow the court in its reformation so faithfully as in its corruption. Jeremy Collier's vehement attack was far from producing the immediate effect which has been ascribed to it; though it was seconded by prosecuting and fining some of the performers for repeating profane and indecent words. Many of Fielding's plays are little less objectionable than the worst of Wycherley's or Shadwell's. The evil, however, bad been checked, though it was not removed; the act which subjected all pieces intended for representation, to a previous censure,' unpopular as it was, operated beneficially in this respect, and from the commencement of the last reign the English stage became irreproachable on the score of decency. A full century elapsed before this evil, which had grown at once. to its height, was thoroughly removed. Had the depravity of manners which the stage in its corruption imitated first and then promoted, continued as long, England would not have been at this time the England that it is. It was happily too opposite to the national character, and too strongly resisted by our excellent institutions, to be of long continuance. Even when it was at the worst there were many things which counteracted it. London did not then communicate its fashions and its follies to the remotest parts of the kingdom: its moral and political diseases hardly spread beyond the atmosphere of its own smoke. But it was from London that foreigners took their estimate of the national manners, and at this distance of time we also are in some degree liable to the same error; for it was London life that the dramatists and other popular writers represented, and against which the censure of moralists and divines was directed. When therefore we find it said that the Englishwomen who formerly had been of high esteem among foreign nations for the modesty and gravity of their conversation, addicted themselves so much to the light garb of the French that they lost much of their honour and reputation among sober persons abroad who before admired them,' it is to be remembered that what was true as relating to the court and the nietropolis, was far from being applicable to the great body of the nation. Beyond that tainted VOL. XXIX. NO. LVII. circle 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 Dryden, 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 more 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 suf fered 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. 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 ). I 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, circle the old Elizabeth breeding' (at which Dryden sneers) was still retained. The ornamental part (as has already been observed) had unhappily fallen into disuse: but if no attempt was made to elevate the minds of women by opening for them the stores of ancient wisdom, they were still trained up in those modest and decorous manners, those religious principles, wherein we have our best security, not for domestic happiness alone, but for the public weal. There were many preserving principles at work. Puritanism itself, which had recently raged like a virulent poison in the body of the state, being then subdued, served as a prophylactic against the prevailing pestilence of licentiousness. Owen, Baxter, and Howe, (a milder and happier spirit than either,) and others of the nonconformist divines, atoned now, in some degree, to the nation by the services which they rendered in the cause of Christian morals, for the offence which they had committed in blowing the trumpet of rebellion, or in assisting at its triumphs. Meanwhile our mother church, whose venerable head had been raised from the dust, exerted what may truly be called a saving influence. To the better part of the nation, (and they were the great majority,) the clergy were deservedly endeared by their constancy and their sufferings. They had indeed, through all their unexampled wrongs, been true to their king, their country, and their order; and the influence which they had gloriously obtained was well supported, for never in any age could they boast of greater ability, sounder learning and more exemplary worth among their members. Few prelates, in times when more abundant means were at their disposal, have surpassed the Caroline bishops in munificence, and fewer of their successors have equalled them. Nor can any age or country boast of greater names than then adorned the English church; it suffices to name Taylor and Barrow and South, the most eloquent, the most cogent, the most powerful of our divines. Among many others who might be specified Burnet himself is not to be omitted. His life of the excellent Bishop Bedel is one of those books which ought to be in every parochial library, if every parish had its library, as it is religiously to be desired that it may before another generation shall have passed away. To his powers as a preacher, Speaker Onslow bears testimony in his notes which are now made public. Burnet mentions the sermon against popery preached by himself at the end of King Charles's reign, from a text which, if not chosen with a political intention, (as he affirms it was not) had at least a strong appearance of being so, and for that reason perhaps was heard with greedier ears. 'Sir John Jekyl,' says the speaker, 'told me that he was present at the sermon, (I think it was this,) and that when the author had preached out the hour-glass, he took it up up and held it aloft in his hand, and then turned it up for another hour: upon which the audience (a very large one for the place) set up almost a shout for joy. I once heard him preach at the Temple church on the subject of popery; it was on the fastday for the negociations of peace at Utrecht. He set forth all the horrors of that religion with such force of speech and action, (for he had much of that in his preaching and action at all times,) that I have never seen an audience any where so much affected as we all were who were present at this discourse. He preached then, as he generally did, without notes. He was, in his exterior too, the finest figure I ever saw in a pulpit.' Onslow speaks also of one of the lectures which Burnet used to deliver in his own house on Sunday evenings. It was upon the new heavens and the new earth after the general conflagration. He first read to us the chapter in St. Peter where this is described; then enlarged upon it with that force of imagination and solemnity of speech and manner, (the subject suiting his genius,) as to make this remembrance of it affect me extremely even now, although it is near forty years ago since I heard it. I remember it the more, because I never heard a preacher equal to him. There was an earnestness of heart, and voice, and look, that is scarcely to be conceived, as it is not the fashion of the present times; and by the want of which, as much as any thing, religion is every day failing with us.' Evelyn confirms this character of Burnet as an orator. In his diary he says, 'I first heard that famous and excellent preacher, Dr. Burnet, with such a flow of eloquence and fulness of matter as shewed him to be a person of extraordinary parts,' In another place, Evelyn, noticing a sermon which he had heard, much after Bishop Andrews's method, full of logical divi sions, in short and broken periods and Latin sentences,' observes, that that method was now quite of fashion in the pulpit, which is grown,' he adds, 'into a far more profitable way of plain and practical discourses, of which neither this nation, or any other, ever had greater plenty, or more profitable (I am confident); so much has it to answer for thriving no better.' The effect was undoubtedly greater than Evelyn then apprehended. It was gradual and silent; but how powerful it was, was seen when the nation was called upon to make a stand against Popery; how permanent it has been, (God be thanked!) we feel at this day; and the best prayer which can be breathed for our country is, that our children's children may continue to feel it through all generations. Dryden, in an unworthy scoff at those persons who preferred the dramatic taste of the Elizabethan age to that, at once extravagant and corrupted, which he prostituted his talents to introduce, says of them, they were unlucky to have been bred in an unpolished 0 2 age, |