carrying letters by laundresses, practising with pedlars to transport
their tokens by colourable means to sell their merchandise, and other
kinds of policies to beguile fathers of their children, husbands of
their wives, guardians of their wards, and masters of their servants,
were aptly taught in these schools of abuse.' {2}

The matter is simple enough. We should not allow these plays to be
acted in our own day, because we know that they would produce their
effects. We should call him a madman who allowed his daughters or
his servants to see such representations. {3} Why, in all fairness,
were the Puritans wrong in condemning that which we now have
absolutely forbidden?

We will go no further into the details of the licentiousness of the
old play-houses. Gosson and his colleague the anonymous Penitent
assert them, as does Prynne, to have been not only schools but
antechambers to houses of a worse kind, and that the lessons learned
in the pit were only not practised also in the pit. What reason have
we to doubt it, who know that till Mr. Macready commenced a practical
reformation of this abuse, for which his name will be ever respected,
our own comparatively purified stage was just the same? Let any one
who remembers the saloons of Drury Lane and Covent Garden thirty
years ago judge for himself what the accessories of the Globe or the
Fortune must have been, in days when players were allowed to talk
inside as freely as the public behaved outside.

Not that the poets or the players had any conscious intention of
demoralising their hearers, any more than they had of correcting
them. We will lay on them the blame of no special malus animus:
but, at the same time, we must treat their fine words about 'holding