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128 hot-bed of idleness and depravity. The grandeur and the depth of its earlier votaries were unappreciated. It recognised no ennobling mission, ministered to no lofty purpose, inculcated no eternal truths; and therefore it has produced no great embodiment of thought and passion, appealing to the universal sympathies of the human race. One main cause was the frivolity and coarseness of the times which immediately succeeded the revival of the drama. Davenant himself had a masculine taste, and his productions exhibit nothing offensive to virtue or morality. But not so his immediate successor, Dryden. The rhyming plays of that great poet are disgraceful to the author who so debased his talents, and to the public that not only endured but applauded such offensive exhibitions. Then, too, when the intolerant bigotry of the Puritan fanaticism had generated that awful revulsion of tastes, manners, feelings and beliefs, that spread with such baneful rapidity over the land; and men sought relief from their previous forced hypocrisy in a licentious and depraved extravagance, the wickedness found its fullest and most perfect expression in the theatre; and the most consummate wit was exhausted in ridiculing all the loftier propensions of man's nature, and the foundation-principles of morality and social life. A literature nursed in so poisonous an atmosphere, necessarily progressed to a sickly maturity. Effects frequently become causal; and long after the nation had changed, the old manners exercised a traditionary influence on the stage, and literary aspirants continued to model their conceptions by established precedents.

The next piece brought out was styled the "Playhouse to be Let, containing the History of Sir Francis Drake, and the Cruelty of the Spaniards at Peru." The piece itself is a stranger jumble than the title. It is divided into five acts, and each act is a complete performance.