Nor was comedy, which took its rise afterwards, the result of corrupt motives.  In the most ancient comedies, we find it to have been the great object of the writers to attack vice.  If a chief citizen had acted inconsistently with his character, he was ridiculed upon the stage.  His very name was not concealed on the occasion.  In the course of time however, the writers of dramatic pieces were forbidden to use the names of the persons, whom they proposed to censure.  But we find them still adhering to the same great object, the exposure of vice; and they painted the vicious character frequently so well, that the person was soon discovered by the audience, though disguised by a fictitious name.  When new restrictions, were afterwards imposed upon the writers of such pieces, they produced a new species of comedy.  This is that which obtains at the present day.  It consisted of an imitation of the manners of common life.  The subject, the names, and the characters, belonging to it, were now all of them feigned.  Writers, however, retained their old object of laughing at folly and of exposing vice.

Thus it appears that the theatre, as far as tragedy was employed, inculcated frequently as good lessons of morality, as heathenism could produce, and as far as comedy was concerned, that it became often the next remedy, after the more grave and moral lectures of the ancient philosophers, against the prevailing excesses of the times.

But though the theatre professed to encourage virtue, and to censure vice, yet such a combination of injurious effects was interwoven with the representations there, arising either from the influence of fiction upon morals, or from the sight of the degradation of the rational character by buffoonery, or from the tendency of such representations to produce levity and dissipation, or from various other causes, that they, who were the greatest lovers of virtue in those days, and the most solicitous of improving the moral condition of man, began to consider them as productive of much more evil than of good.  Solon forewarned Thespis, that the effects of such plays, as he saw him act, would become in time injurious to the morals of mankind, and he forbade him to act again.  The Athenians, though such performances were afterwards allowed, would never permit any of their judges to compose a comedy.  The Spartans under Lycurgus, who were the most virtuous of all the people of Greece, would not suffer either tragedies or comedies to be acted at all.  Plato, as he had banished music, so he banished theatrical exhibitions from his pure republic.  Seneca considered, that vice made insensible approaches by means of the stage, and that it stole on the people in the disguise of pleasure.  The Romans, in their purer times, considered the stage to be so disgraceful, that every Roman was to be degraded, who became an actor, and so pernicious to morals, that they put it under the power of a censor, to control its effects.