to forfeit five shillings.  This was the coup de grace; for the stage had already undergone many and severe assaults.  The player’s tenure of his art had become more and more precarious, until acting seemed to be as a service of danger.  The ordinance of 1647 closed the theatres for nearly fourteen years; but for some sixteen years before the stage had been in a more or less depressed condition.  Scarcely any new dramatists of distinction had appeared after 1630.  The theatres were considerably reduced in number by the time 1636 was arrived at.  Then came the arbitrary closing of the playhouses—­professedly but for a season.  Thus in 1636 they were closed for ten months; in 1642 for eighteen months.  In truth Puritanism carried on its victorious campaign against the drama for something like thirty years; while even at an earlier date there had been certain skirmishing attacks upon the stage.  With the first Puritan began the quarrel with the players.  As Isaac Disraeli has observed, “we must go back to the reign of Elizabeth to comprehend an event which occurred in that of Charles I.”  A sanctimonious sect urged extravagant reforms—­at first, perhaps, in all simplicity—­founding their opinions upon cramped and literal interpretations of divine precepts, and forming views of human nature “more practicable in a desert than a city, and rather suited to a monastic order than to a polished people.”  Still, these fanatics could scarcely have dreamed that power would ever be given them to carry their peculiar theories into practice, and to govern a nation as though it were composed entirely of precisians and bigots.  For two generations—­from the Reformation to the Civil War—­the Puritans had been the butt of the satirical, the jest of the wits—­ridiculed and laughed at on all sides.  Then came a time, “when,” in the words of Macaulay, “the laughers began to look grave in their turn.  The rigid ungainly zealots ... rose up in arms, conquered, ruled, and, grimly smiling, trod down under their feet the whole crowd of mockers.”

Yet from the first the Puritans had not neglected the pen as a weapon of offence.  In 1579 Stephen Gosson published his curious pamphlet bearing the lengthy title of “The Schoole of Abuse, containing a pleasant Invective against Poets, Pipers, Jesters, and such like Catterpillars of a Commonwealth; setting up the Flag of Defiance to their mischievous exercise, and overthrowing their Bulwarks, by Profane Writers, natural reason, and common experience:  A Discourse as pleasant for gentlemen that favour learning as profitable for all that will follow virtue.”  Gosson expresses himself with much quaint force, but he is not absolutely intolerant.  He was a student of Oxford University, had in his youth written poems and plays, and even appeared upon the scene as an actor.  Although he had repented of these follies, he still viewed them without acrimony.  To his pamphlet we are indebted for certain interesting details in regard to the manners and customs of the Elizabethan