fully justifying old Prynne's indignant complaint -


'The acting of foreign, obsolete, and long since forgotten villanies
on the stage, is so far from working a detestation of them in the
spectators' minds (who, perchance, were utterly ignorant of them,
till they were acquainted with them at the play-house, and so needed
no dehortation from them), that it often excites dangerous dunghill
spirits, who have nothing in them for to make them eminent, to reduce
them into practice, of purpose to perpetuate their spurious ill-
serving memories to posterity, leastwise in some tragic interlude.'


That Prynne spoke herein nought but sober sense, our own police
reports will sufficiently prove. It is notorious that the
representation in our own days of 'Tom and Jerry' and of 'Jack
Sheppard' did excite dozens of young lads to imitate the heroes of
those dramas; and such must have been the effect of similar and worse
representations in the Stuart age. No rational man will need the
authority of Bishop Babington, Doctor Leighton, Archbishop Parker,
Purchas, Sparkes, Reynolds, White, or any one else, Churchman or
Puritan, prelate or 'penitent reclaimed play-poet,' like Stephen
Gosson, to convince him that, as they assert, citizens' wives (who
are generally represented as the proper subjects for seduction)
'have, even on their deathbeds, with tears confessed that they have
received, at these spectacles, such evil infections as have turned
their minds from chaste cogitations, and made them, of honest women,
light huswives; . . . have brought their husbands into contempt,
their children into question, . . . and their souls into the assault
of a dangerous state;' or that 'The devices of carrying and re-