settled into the determinate and pleasing dissyllabic arrangement which it still retains.  Aminadab Liston, the eldest male representative of the family of that day, was of the strictest order of Puritans.  Mr. Foss, of Pall Mall, has obligingly communicated to me an undoubted tract of his, which bears the initials only, A.L., and is entitled, ’The Grinning Glass:  or Actor’s Mirrour, wherein the vituperative Visnomy of vicious Players for the Scene is as virtuously reflected back upon their mimetic Monstrosities as it has viciously (hitherto) vitiated with its vile Vanities her Votarists.’  A strange title, but bearing the impress of those absurdities with which the title-pages of that pamphlet-spawning age abounded.  The work bears date 1617.  It preceded the ‘Histriomastix’ by fifteen years; and as it went before it in time, so it comes not far short of it in virulence.  It is amusing to find an ancestor of Listen’s thus bespattering the players at the commencement of the seventeenth century:—­

“‘Thinketh He,’ (the actor,) ’with his costive countenances, to wry a sorrowing soul out of her anguish, or by defacing the divine denotement of destinate dignity (daignely described in the face humane and no other) to reinstamp the Paradice-plotted similitude with a novel and naughty approximation (not in the first intention) to those abhorred and ugly God-forbidden correspondences, with flouting Apes’ jeering gibberings, and Babion babbling-like, to hoot out of countenance all modest measure, as if our sins were not sufficing to stoop our backs without He wresting and crooking his members to mistimed mirth (rather malice) in deformed fashion, leering when he should learn, prating for praying, goggling his eyes, (better upturned for grace,) whereas in Paradice (if we can go thus high for His profession) that devilish Serpent appeareth his undoubted Predecessor, first induing a mask like some roguish roistering Roscius (I spit at them all) to beguile with Stage shows the gaping Woman, whose Sex hath still chiefly upheld these Mysteries, and are voiced to be the chief Stage-haunters, where, as I am told, the custom is commonly to mumble (between acts) apples, not ambiguously derived from that pernicious Pippin, (worse in effect than the Apples of Discord,) whereas sometimes the hissing sounds of displeasure, as I hear, do lively reintonate that snake-taking-leave, and diabolical goings off, in Paradice.’

“The Puritanic effervescence of the early Presbyterians appears to have abated with time, and the opinions of the more immediate ancestors of our subject to have subsided at length into a strain of moderate Calvinism.  Still a tincture of the old leaven was to be expected among the posterity of A.L.