After 1693, Jeremy Collier’s name was not brought before the public till 1696, when he publicly absolved Sir John Friend and Sir William Perkins, at their execution, for being concerned in a plot to assassinate King William.  His ‘Essays on Moral Subjects’ were published in 1697; 2nd vol., 1705; 3rd vol., 1709.  But the only way to put out a firebrand like this is to let it alone, and Jeremy, being, no longer persecuted, began, at last, to think the game was grown stupid, and gave it up.  He was a well-meaning man, however, and as long as he had the luxury of a grievance, would injure no one.

He found one now in the immorality of his age, and if he had left politics to themselves from the first, he might have done much more good than he did.  Against the vices of a court and courtly circles it was useless to start a crusade single-handed; but his quaint clever pen might yet dress out a powerful Jeremiad against those who encouraged the licentiousness of the people.  Jeremy was no Puritan, for he was a Nonjuror and a Jacobite, and we may, therefore, believe that the cause was a good one, when we find him adopting precisely the same line as the Puritans had done before him.  In 1698 he published, to the disgust of all Drury and Lincoln’s Inn, his ’Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, together with the Sense of Antiquity upon this Argument.’

While the King of Naples is supplying his ancient Venuses with gowns, and putting his Mars and Hercules into pantaloons, there are—­such are the varieties of opinion—­respectable men in this country who call Paul de Kock the greatest moral writer of his age, and who would yet like to see ‘The Relapse,’ ‘Love for Love,’ and the choice specimens of Wycherley, Farquhar, and even of Beaumont and Fletcher, acted at the Princess’s and the Haymarket in the year of grace 1860.  I am not writing ‘A Short View’ of this or any other moral subject; but this I must say—­the effect of a sight or sound on a human being’s silly little passions must of necessity be relative.  Staid people read ‘Don Juan,’ Lewis’s ‘Monk,’ the plays of Congreve, and any or all of the publications of Holywell Street, without more than disgust at their obscenity and admiration for their beauties.  But could we be pardoned for putting these works into the hands of ‘sweet seventeen,’ or making Christmas presents of them to our boys?  Ignorance of evil is, to a certain extent, virtue:  let boys be boys in purity of mind as long as they can:  let the unrefined ‘great unwashed’ be treated also much in the same way as young people.  I maintain that to a coarse mind all improper ideas, however beautifully clothed, suggest only sensual thoughts—­nay, the very modesty of the garments makes them the more insidious—­the more dangerous.  I would rather give my boy Jonson, Massinger, or Beaumont and Fletcher, whose very improper things ‘are called by their proper names,’ than let him dive in the prurient innuendo of these later writers.