to have been put down, and whether the laws were necessary, is a
different question; but certainly the court and the aristocracy stood
in the questionable, though too common, position of men who made laws
which prohibited to the poor amusements in which they themselves
indulged without restraint.

But were these plays objectionable? As far as the comedies are
concerned, that will depend on the answer to the question, Are plays
objectionable, the staple subject of which is adultery? Now, we
cannot but agree with the Puritans, that adultery is not a subject
for comedy at all. It may be for tragedy; but for comedy never. It
is a sin; not merely theologically, but socially, one of the very
worst sins, the parent of seven other sins,--of falsehood, suspicion,
hate, murder, and a whole bevy of devils. The prevalence of adultery
in any country has always been a sign and a cause of social
insincerity, division, and revolution; where a people has learnt to
connive and laugh at it, and to treat it as a light thing, that
people has been always careless, base, selfish, cowardly,--ripe for
slavery. And we must say that either the courtiers and Londoners of
James and Charles the First were in that state, or that the poets
were doing their best to make them so.

We shall not shock our readers by any details on this point; we shall
only say that there is hardly a comedy of the seventeenth century,
with the exception of Shakspeare's, in which adultery is not
introduced as a subject of laughter, and often made the staple of the
whole plot. The seducer is, if not openly applauded, at least let to
pass as a 'handsome gentleman'; the injured husband is, as in that
Italian literature of which we shall speak shortly, the object of
every kind of scorn and ridicule. In this latter habit (common to