* * * * *

Let them who the rebellion first began
To wit, restore the monarch if they can;
Our author dares not be the first bold man.

And upon another occasion: 

But when all failed to strike the stage quite dumb,
Those wicked engines, called machines, are come. 
Thunder and lightning now for wit are played,
And shortly scenes in Lapland will be laid.

* * * * *

Fletcher’s despised, your Jonson out of fashion. 
And wit the only drug in all the nation.

Actresses, too, were introduced upon the stage in pursuance of continental example.  But for these there was really great necessity.  The boys who, prior to the Civil War, had personated the heroines of the drama, were now too mature, both in years and aspect, for such an occupation.

    Doubting we should never play agen,
    We have played all our women into men!

says the prologue, introducing the first actress.  Hart and Mohun, Clun, Shatterel and Burt, who were now leading actors, had been boy-actresses before the closing of the theatres.  And even after the Restoration, Mohun whose military title of major was always awarded him in the playbills, still appeared as Bellamante, one of the heroines of Shirley’s tragedy of “Love’s Cruelty.”  But this must have been rather too absurd.  At the time of the Restoration Mohun could hardly have been less than thirty-five years of age.  It is to be noted, however, that Kynaston, a very distinguished boy-actress, who, with Betterton, was a pupil of Rhodes, arose after the Restoration.  Of the earlier boy-actresses, their methods and artifices of performance, Kynaston could have known nothing.  He was undoubtedly a great artist, winning extraordinary favour both in male and female characters, the last and perhaps the best of all the epicene stage-players of the past.

But if the stage, after the Restoration, differed greatly from what it had been previously, it yet prospered and gained strength more and more.  It was most fortunate in its actors and actresses, who lent it invaluable support.  It never attained again the poetic heights to which it had once soared; but it surrendered gradually much of its grossness and its baser qualities, in deference to the improving tastes of its patrons, and in alarm at the sound strictures of men like Jeremy Collier.  The plagiarist, the adapter, and the translator did not relax their hold upon it; but eventually it obtained the aid of numerous dramatists of enduring distinction.  The fact that it again underwent decline is traceable to various causes—­among them, the monopoly enjoyed by privileged persons under the patents granted by Charles II.; the bungling intervention of court officials invested with supreme power over the dramatic literature of the nation; and defective copyright laws, that rendered justice neither to the native nor to the foreign writer for the theatre.  And something, too, the stage of later years has been affected by a change in public taste, which has subordinated the play to the novel or poem, and converted playgoers into the supporters of circulating libraries.