In the face of this danger we will go on to say as much as we dare of
the great cause, Puritans v. Players, before our readers, trusting to
find some of them at least sufficiently unacquainted with the common
notions on the point to form a fair decision.


What those notions are is well known. Very many of her Majesty's
subjects are of opinion that the first half of the seventeenth
century (if the Puritans had not interfered and spoilt all) was the
most beautiful period of the English nation's life; that in it the
chivalry and ardent piety of the Middle Age were happily combined
with modern art and civilisation; that the Puritan hatred of the
Court, of stage-plays, of the fashions of the time, was only 'a
scrupulous and fantastical niceness'; barbaric and tasteless, if
sincere; if insincere, the basest hypocrisy; that the stage-plays,
though coarse, were no worse than Shakspeare, whom everybody reads;
and that if the Stuarts patronised the stage they also raised it, and
exercised a purifying censorship. And many more who do not go all
these lengths with the reactionists, and cannot make up their mind to
look to the Stuart reigns either for model churchmen or model
courtiers, are still inclined to sneer at the Puritan 'preciseness,'
and to say lazily, that though, of course, something may have been
wrong, yet there was no need to make such a fuss about the matter;
and that at all events the Puritans were men of very bad taste.

Mr. Gifford, in his introduction to Massinger's plays (1813), was
probably the spokesman of his own generation, certainly of a great
part of this generation also, when he informs us, that 'with
Massinger terminated the triumph of dramatic poetry; indeed, the