feeling, in a personating male; and to this cause may we not attribute that the female characters have never been made chief personages among our elder poets, as they would assuredly have been, had they not been conscious that the male actor could not have sufficiently affected the audience?  A poet who lived in Charles the Second’s day, and who has written a prologue to Othello, to introduce the first actress on our stage, has humorously touched on this gross absurdity.

    Our women are defective, and so sized,
    You’d think they were some of the Guard disguised;
    For to speak truth, men act, that are between
    Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen;
    With brows so large, and nerve so uncompliant,
    When you call Desdemona—­enter Giant.

Yet at the time the absurd custom prevailed, Tom Nash, in his Pierce Pennilesse, commends our stage for not having, as they had abroad, women-actors, or “courtezans,” as he calls them:  and even so late as in 1650, when women were first introduced on our stage, endless are the apologies for the indecorum of this novel usage!  Such are the difficulties which occur even in forcing bad customs to return to nature; and so long does it take to infuse into the multitude a little common sense!  It is even probable that this happy revolution originated from mere necessity, rather than from choice; for the boys who had been trained to act female characters before the Rebellion, during the present suspension of the theatre, had grown too masculine to resume their tender office at the Restoration; and, as the same poet observes,

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

so that the introduction of women was the mere result of necessity:—­hence all these apologies for the most natural ornament of the stage.[151]

This volume of Reynolds seems to have been the shadow and precursor of one of the most substantial of literary monsters, in the tremendous “Histriomastix, or Player’s Scourge,” of Prynne, in 1633.  In that volume, of more than a thousand closely-printed quarto pages, all that was ever written against plays and players, perhaps, may be found:  what followed could only have been transcripts from a genius who could raise at once the Mountain and the Mouse.  Yet Collier, so late as in 1698, renewed the attack still more vigorously, and with final success; although he left room for Arthur Bedford a few years afterwards, in his “Evil and Danger of Stage-plays:”  in which extraordinary work he produced “seven thousand instances, taken out of plays of the present century;” and a catalogue of “fourteen hundred texts of scripture, ridiculed by the Stage.”  This religious anti-dramatist must have been more deeply read in the drama than even its most fervent lovers.  His piety pursued too deeply the study of such impious productions; and such labours were probably not without more amusement than he ought to have found in them.