A period in our dramatic annals has been passed over during the progress of the civil wars, which indeed was one of silence, but not of repose in the theatre.  It lasted beyond the death of Charles the First, when the fine arts seemed also to have suffered with the monarch.  The theatre, for the first time in any nation, was abolished by a public ordinance, and the actors, and consequently all that family of genius who by their labours or their tastes are connected with the drama, were reduced to silence.  The actors were forcibly dispersed, and became even some of the most persecuted objects of the new government.

It may excite our curiosity to trace the hidden footsteps of this numerous fraternity of genius.  Hypocrisy and Fanaticism had, at length, triumphed over Wit and Satire.  A single blow could not, however, annihilate those never-dying powers; nor is suppression always extinction.  Reduced to a state which did not allow of uniting in a body, still their habits and their affections could not desert them:  actors would attempt to resume their functions, and the genius of the authors and the tastes of the people would occasionally break out, though scattered and concealed.

Mr. Gifford has noticed, in his introduction to Massinger, the noble contrast between our actors at that time, with those of revolutionary France, when, to use his own emphatic expression—­“One wretched actor only deserted his sovereign; while of the vast multitude fostered by the nobility and the royal family of France, not one individual adhered to their cause:  all rushed madly forward to plunder and assassinate their benefactors.”

The contrast is striking, but the result must be traced to a different principle; for the cases are not parallel as they appear.  The French actors did not occupy the same ground as ours.  Here, the fanatics shut up the theatre, and extirpated the art and the artists:  there, the fanatics enthusiastically converted the theatre into an instrument of their own revolution, and the French actors therefore found an increased national patronage.  It was natural enough that actors would not desert a flourishing profession.  “The plunder and assassinations,” indeed, were quite peculiar to themselves as Frenchmen, not as actors.

The destruction of the theatre here was the result of an ancient quarrel between the puritanic party and the whole corps dramatique.  In this little history of plays and players, like more important history, we perceive how all human events form but a series of consequences, linked together; and we must go back to the reign of Elizabeth to comprehend an event which occurred in that of Charles the First.  It has been perhaps peculiar to this land of contending opinions, and of happy and unhappy liberty, that a gloomy sect was early formed, who drawing, as they fancied, the principles of their conduct from the literal precepts of the Gospel, formed those views of human nature which were more practicable in a desert than