280 RANDOM THOUGHTS ON HUNTING. 



examining the plays of the elder dramatists of 

 Ford and Webster, for example and comparing 

 them with such as are now exhibited. Few of 

 these but would be hissed from the modern thea- 

 tres, if represented as originally played. J^ay, even 

 those of Shakspeare and Jonson, if played from the 

 original copies, would share the same fate, along 

 with many masterly efforts of Beaumont and 

 Fletcher, and Otway and Dryden, which their 

 indecency has banished from the stage. And, 

 indeed, to such an extent has this reform proceeded, 

 that you may chance to hear fewer things offensive 

 to delicacy, in our theatres now-a-days, than in 

 some pulpits that could be named wherein vice is 

 stripped with so determined a hand, that decency 

 revolts at the exhibition (as if modesty were 

 unscriptural, and the maxim, " pudorem ilium 

 superandum esse," were now, as formerly, the rule 

 of the church) and those passages of Scripture, 

 which men scruple to read aloud in the presence 

 of their families, you may hear so paraded and dal- 

 lied with before the congregation of the young and 

 pure in heart, that the indignant blush of shame is 

 seen mantling their innocent cheeks ! Compre- 

 hensive as the Decalogue assuredly is, there is yet 

 nothing in it akin to indecency ; and it seems quite 

 possible to exhort man to the performance of his 



