Dramatic compositions appear to have had no reprehensible origin. It certainly was an object with the authors of some of the earliest plays to combine the entertainment with the moral improvement of the mind. Tragedy was at first simply a monody to Bacchus. But the tragedy of the antients, from which the modern is derived, did not arise in the world till the dialogue and the chorus were introduced. Now the chorus, as every scholar knows, was a moral office. They who filled it were loud in their recommendations of justice and temperance. They inculcated a religious observance of the laws. They implored punishment on the abandoned. They were strenuous in their discouragement of vice, and in their promotion of virtue. This office, therefore, being coæval with tragedy itself, preserves it from the charge of an immoral origin.

In

Nor was comedy, which took its rise afterwards, the result of corrupt motives. the most antient comedies we find it to have been the great object of the writers to attack vice. If a chief citizen had acted inconsistently with his character, he was ridi

culed

sure.

culed upon the stage. His very name was not concealed on the occasion. In the course of time, however, the writers of dramatic pieces were forbidden to use the names of the persons, whom they proposed to cenBut we find them still adhering to the same great object,-the exposure of vice; and they painted the vicious character frequently so well, that the person was soon discovered by the audience, though disguised by a fictitious name. When new restrictions were afterwards imposed upon the writers of such pieces, they produced a new species of comedy. This is that which obtains at the present day. It consisted of an imitation of the manners of common life. The subject, the names, and the characters belonging to it, were now all of them feigned. Writers, however, retained their old object of laughing at folly and of exposing vice.

Thus it appears that the theatre, as far as tragedy was employed, inculcated frequently as good lessons of morality as heathenism could produce; and, as far as comedy was concerned, that it became often the next

remedy,

remedy, after the more grave and moral lectures of the antient philosophers, against the prevailing excesses of the times.

But though the theatre professed to encourage virtue and to censure vice, yet such a combination of injurious effects was interwoven with the representations there, arising either from the influence of fiction upon morals, or from the sight of the degradation of the rational character by buffoonery, or from the tendency of such representations to produce levity and dissipation, or from various other causes, that they, who were the greatest lovers of virtue in those days, and the most solicitous of improving the moral condition of man, began to consider them as productive of much more evil than of good. Solon forewarned Thespis that the effects of such plays as he saw him act would become in time injurious to the morals of mankind; and he forbade him to act again. The Athenians, though such performances were afterwards allowed, would never permit any of their judges to compose a comedy. The Spartans under Lycurgus, who were the most virtuous of all the people of Greece, would not suffer either

either tragedies or comedies to be acted at all. Plato, as he had banished music, so he banished theatrical exhibitions from his pure republic. Seneca considered that vice made insensible approaches by means of the stage, and that it stole on the people in the disguise of pleasure. The Romans, in their purer times, considered the stage to be so disgraceful, that every Roman was to be degraded who became an actor; and so pernicious to morals, that they put it under the power of a censor to control its efforts.

But the stage in the time of Charles the Second, when the Quakers first appeared in the world, was in a worse state than even in the Grecian or Roman times. If there was ever a period in any country when it was noted as the school of profligate and corrupt morals, it was in this reign. George Fox, therefore, as a Christian reformer, could not be supposed to be behind the heathen philosophers in a case where morality was concerned. Accordingly we find him protesting publicly against all such spectacles. In this protest he was joined by Robert Barclay and William Fenn, two of the greatest men of those times, who in their respective

respective publications attacked them with great spirit. These publications showed the sentiments of the Quakers, as a religious body, upon this subject. It was understood that no Quaker could be present at amusements of this sort. And this idea was con firmed by the sentiments and advices of several of the most religious members, which were delivered on public occasions. By means of these publications and advices the subject was kept alive, till it became at length incorporated into the religious discipline of the Society. The theatre was then specifically forbidden; and an inquiry was annually to be made from thenceforward, whether any of the members of it had been found violating the prohibition.

Since the time of Charles the Second, when George Fox entered his protest against exhibitions of this sort, it must certainly be confessed that an alteration has taken place for the better in the constitution of our plays, and that poison is not diffused into morals by means of them, to an equal extent, as at that period. The mischief has been considerably circumscribed by legal inspection, and, it is to be hoped, by the improved civilization