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boar’s head at a feast, or to a dance on the village green. Still 
the love of the drama lay deeply imbedded in the hearts of the 
English people. John Milton, poet and Puritan as he was, writes 
most heartily of his admiration for the stage. 
England then passed through a fiery furnace only to find in 
the accession of Charles II. more licentiousness and more 
immorality than has ever disgraced the pages of our history. The 
Court at Whitehall gave the tone to English society ; and dramas 
generally are but the reflections of what society thinks and does. 
The vices of the Court were mirrored by the poets and dramatists 
of that day, who manufactured grossness and immorality for the 
wicked men and women who thronged around an idle and ~ 
dissolute king. 
The plays of the poet Dryden are nearly all tainted with the 
poisonous atmosphere of the time, while those of Wycherly are the 
most diseased specimens which remain to the present day. It is 
to be regretted that many dramatists courted fame,—not by the 
midnight lamp in the student’s cell, but in the festivities of the 
great Metropolis, sharpening their wits against superior brains, and, 
if unsuccessful, falling one by one into a wasted life. It must be 
remembered that every poet more or less tries to write a play. It 
has ever been a favourite style of composition. The creation of 
character, the freedom of thought, the satires on the times, and to. 
hear from the actor’s lips the conceptions of the dramatist, have 
generally been the ambition of poets. Few young writers think, 
when they sit down to write a play, of its positive necessities, of the 
- unities of time and place; and I think it may be asserted, of all 
the rubbish written in novels and in books, there cannot be more 
presented than is offered to the public in the shape of plays. On 
one occasion a play was sent to me for perusal, and when I opened 
the manuscript, I found the story commenced in the infernal 
regions, with a dialogue between three evil spirits, when to them 
