You see, Sir, I have given my Thoughts freely:  I wish they may receive your Approbation; because I wou’d never think but to please you.  I dare not now think of excusing any thing I have writ, for I was resolv’d to tie my self to no Method, but to think as much as I cou’d for the advantage of the Stage, which I must believe very lawful, for any thing I have yet met to the contrary.  Nor can I be perswaded, that our Plays have had so ill effect as some wou’d imagine.  The best of our Plays have nothing in them that is so scandalous; and for the worst, I wou’d not allow them the Credit, nor the Authors the Vanity to think they could influence any one Man.  The evil Conversation of some of them wou’d frighten a Man from being vicious; so that they are serviceable against their Wills, and do the World a Kindness through mistake.  I dare not stay any longer with you, tho’ I have a great Inclination to beg you’d excuse the roughness of my Stile:  But you know I have been busie in Virgil; and that they say, at Will’s, is enough to spoil it:  But if I had begg’d a more important thing, and ask’d you to forgive the length of my Letter, I might assure my self you wou’d oblige,

Your Humble Servant.

FINIS.

THE Occasional Paper: 
Number IX.

Containing some
CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE DANGER
Of going to PLAYS.

In a Letter to a Friend.

LONDON,
Printed for M. Wotton, at the Three Daggers in Fleet Street.
1698.

SIR,

Being well assured that you sincerely desire to live as becomes a Christian, though you are not in Holy Orders; and that your complying with some things in use among those with whom you converse, is rather from a care to avoid being over-nice to the prejudice of Religion, than any want of a due Concern for the Interest of it:  I cannot refuse the letting you see all at once, my thoughts of that, which having been at several times discoursed on between us, was never yet brought to a perfect Conclusion.

I have always found you doubting the Lawfulness, at least the Expedience of going to Plays, as they are now acted amongst us; and sometimes you have seem’d to think it did not consist with the Faith of the Gospel, considering the Outrage committed there for the most part upon it, in one instance or other.  And a fresh sense of this I perceive has been given you, by the late lively Account of the Stages, the natural colours of which indeed are so black as to be more than enough to affright those who have any Fear of Him that ought to be feared, or any Dread of the Ruin of Men.

But for as much as the thread of that serious Design may seem broken too often with Observations of Learning, and Reflections of Wit, to be closely follow’d by those who are either not used to the one, or too fond of the other; the same good End may perhaps be helped forward a little, by setting this matter in a less interrupted Light, and a Simpler View.