The indelicacy of the stage, being, in its earliest period, merely the coarse gross raillery of a barbarous age, was probably of no greater injury to the morals of the audience, than it is to those of the lower ranks of society, with whom similar language is everywhere admitted as wit and humour.  During the reigns of James I. and Charles I. this licence was gradually disappearing.  In the domination of the fanatics, which succeeded, matters were so much changed, that, far from permitting the use of indelicate or profane allusions, they wrapped up not only their most common temporal affairs, but even their very crimes and vices, in the language of their spiritual concerns.  Luxury was using the creature; avarice was seeking experiences; insurrection was putting the hand to the plough; actual rebellion, fighting the good fight; and regicide, doing the great work of the Lord. This vocabulary became grievously unfashionable at the Reformation, and was at once swept away by the torrent of irreligion, blasphemy, and indecency, which were at that period deemed necessary to secure conversation against the imputation of disloyalty and fanaticism.  The court of Cromwell, if lampoons can be believed, was not much less vicious than that of Charles II., but it was less scandalous; and, as Dryden himself expresses it,

  “The sin was of our native growth, ’tis true;
  The scandal of the sin was wholly new. 
  Misses there were, but modestly concealed,
  Whitehall the naked Goddess first revealed;
  Who standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine,
  The strumpet was adored with rites divine.”

This torrent of licentiousness had begun in some degree to abate, even upon the accession of James II., whose manners did not encourage the same general licence as those of Charles.  But after the Revolution, when an affectation of profligacy was no longer deemed a necessary attribute of loyalty, and when it began to be thought possible that a man might have some respect for religion without being a republican, or even a fanatic, the licence of the stage was generally esteemed a nuisance.  It then happened, as is not uncommon, that those, most bustling and active to correct public abuses, were men whose intentions may, without doing them injury, be estimated more highly than their talents.  Thus, Sir Richard Blackmore, a grave physician, residing and practising on the sober side of Temple-Bar, was the first who professed to reform the spreading pest of poetical licentiousness, and to correct such men as Dryden, Congreve, and Wycherly.  This worthy person, compassionating the state to which poetry was reduced by his contemporaries, who used their wit “in opposition to religion, and to the destruction of virtue and good manners in the world,” resolved to rescue the Muses from this unworthy thraldom, “to restore them to their sweet and chaste mansions, and to engage them in an employment suited to their dignity.”