a city, and which were rather suited to a monastic order than to a polished people.  These were our puritans, who at first, perhaps from utter simplicity, among other extravagant reforms, imagined that of the extinction of the theatre.  Numerous works from that time fatigued their own pens and their readers’ heads, founded on literal interpretations of the Scriptures, which were applied to our drama, though written ere our drama existed:  voluminous quotations from the Fathers, who had only witnessed farcical interludes and licentious pantomimes:  they even quoted classical authority to prove that a “stage-player” was considered infamous by the Romans; among whom, however, Roscius, the admiration of Rome, received the princely remuneration of a thousand denarii per diem; the tragedian, AEsopus, bequeathed about L150,000 to his son;[148] remunerations which show the high regard in which the great actors were held among the Roman people.

A series of writers might be collected of these anti-dramatists.[149] The licentiousness of our comedies had too often indeed presented a fair occasion for their attacks; and they at length succeeded in purifying the stage:  we owe them this good, but we owe little gratitude to that blind zeal which was desirous of extinguishing the theatre, which wanted the taste also to feel that the theatre was a popular school of morality; that the stage is a supplement to the pulpit; where virtue, according to Plato’s sublime idea, moves our love and affections when made visible to the eye.  Of this class, among the earliest writers was Stephen Gosson, who in 1579 published “The School of Abuse, or a Pleasant Invective against Poets, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars.”  Yet this Gosson dedicated his work to Sir Philip Sidney, a great lover of plays, and one who has vindicated their morality in his “Defence of Poesy.”  The same puritanic spirit soon reached our universities; for when a Dr. Gager had a play performed at Christchurch, Dr. Reynolds, of Queen’s College, terrified at the Satanic novelty, published “The Ouerthrow of Stage-plays,” 1593; a tedious invective, foaming at the mouth of its text with quotations and authorities; for that was the age when authority was stronger than opinion, and the slightest could awe the readers.  Reynolds takes great pains to prove that a stage-play is infamous, by the opinions of antiquity; that a theatre corrupts morals, by those of the Fathers; but the most reasonable point of attack is “the sin of boys wearing the dress and affecting the airs of women."[150] This was too long a flagrant evil in the theatrical economy.  To us there appears something so repulsive in the exhibition of boys, or men, personating female characters, that one cannot conceive how they could ever have been tolerated as a substitute for the spontaneous grace, the melting voice, and the soothing looks of a female.  It was quite impossible to give the tenderness of a woman to any perfection of