grave and reverend prelates and divines look on approving. The
Westminster play has had no very purifying influence on the minds of
the young gentlemen who personate heathen damsels; and we only ask,
What must have been the effect of representing far fouler characters
than Terence's on the minds of uneducated lads of the lower classes?
Prynne and others hint at still darker abominations than the mere
defilement of the conscience: we shall say nothing of them, but
that, from collateral evidence, we believe every word they say; and
that when pretty little Cupid's mother, in Jonson's Christmas masque,
tells how 'She could have had money enough for him, had she been
tempted, and have let him out by the week to the king's players,' and
how 'Master Burbadge has been about and about with her for him, and
old Mr. Hemings too,' she had better have tied a stone round the
child's neck, and hove him over London Bridge, than have handed him
over to thrifty Burbadge, that he might make out of his degradation
more money to buy land withal, and settle comfortably in his native
town, on the fruits of others' sin. Honour to old Prynne, bitter and
narrow as he was, for his passionate and eloquent appeals to the
humanity and Christianity of England, in behalf of those poor
children whom not a bishop on the bench interfered to save; but,
while they were writing and persecuting in behalf of baptismal
regeneration, left those to perish whom they declared so stoutly to
be regenerate in baptism. Prynne used that argument too, and
declared these stage-plays to be among the very 'pomps and vanities
which Christians renounced at baptism.' He may or may not have been
wrong in identifying them with the old heathen pantomimes and games
of the circus, and in burying his adversaries under a mountain of
quotations from the Fathers and the Romish divines (for Prynne's
reading seems to have been quite enormous). Those very prelates
could express reverence enough for the Fathers when they found aught