is in the nature of an accident, is a common and mechanical device of
Georgian tragedy" (I, 330). Hill employed the device, the good news
coming as a complete surprise, but he made it part of a carefully
ordered plot designed to reveal the direct intervention and mysterious
workings of a particular Providence, making characterization and action
consistent, and giving his play a precise theological significance. In
Moore's day, however, under the impact of deism and the developing
rationalism, the concept of a particular Providence in orthodox theology
had become so subtilized that the older idea of direct and striking
intervention in human affairs all but disappeared. By mid-eighteenth
century, deity, as Leslie Stephen points out, "appears under the
colourless shape of Providence--a word which may be taken to imply
a remote divine superintendence, without admitting an actual divine
interference" (_History of English Thought In the Eighteenth Century_,
II, 336). The references to Providence in Moore's play are of this type,
pious labels on prudential morality. Moore carefully avoids the various
devices employed by Hill to indicate direct divine intervention;
consequently the late arrival of the news of the uncle's death (which
was expected throughout the play) is without special meaning, and serves
only as a theatrical device intended to heighten the emotional effect.
_The Gamester_, then, is a clear reflection of the state of English
thought in the middle of the eighteenth century, in which a declining
theology becomes suffused with the ideas and sentiments of the moralists
of the age.

Despite the popularity of their plays, neither Lillo nor Moore inspired
any significant followers in England. On the Continent, however, their
influence was considerable. In his introduction to his edition of _The
London Merchant_, A.W. Ward traces Lillo's influence on the Continent,
and Caskey gives a detailed account of Moore's (119-134). _The Gamester_