re potent to
debase and corrupt the minds of a people than a licentious stage. But it
may be averred with equal truth, that the abuses of every other
institution are fraught with no less mischief to the public. At this
very moment the abuse of the pulpit is the parent of more public
mischief in Great Britain and America than the stage ever produced in
its most prolific days of vice; and it is deplorable to reflect that the
former is rapidly increasing, while the vitiation of the latter has been
for a century on the decline. The licentiousness of the stage in the
reign of Charles II was enormous: but it was a licentiousness which the
theatre in common with the whole nation derived from the court, and from
a most flagitious monarch whose example made vice fashionable. In
servile compliance with the reigning taste, the greatest poets of the
day abandoned true fame, and discarded much of their literary merit:
Otway and Dryden sunk into the most mean and criminal slavery to it--the
former with the greatest powers for the pathetic ever possessed by any
man, Shakspeare excepted, has left behind him plays which in an almost
equal degree excite our admiration and contempt, our indignation and our
pity. It is charitable to suppose that "his poverty and not his will
consented." But Dryden had no such excuse to plead for his base
subserviency to pecuniary advantage, or for the detestable
licentiousness of his comedies. He who will take the pains to turn to
that admirable tragedy, Venice Preserved, by Otway, will find in the
scenes between Aquileia and the old senator Antonio enough to disgust
the taste of any one not callous to all sense of delicacy. But had
Juvenal lived at that period, he would have scourged Dryden out of
society. To those we might add Wycherly. Congreve and other cotemporary
authors succeeded: but the offences committed by those men can no more
be alleged as a ground of general condemnation of the stage, than the
works of lord Rochester can be set up as a reason for condemning Milton,
Pope, Thomson, Goldsmith, and all our other poets, or the innumerable
murders committed by unprincipled quacks, be alleged as a cause for
abolishing the whole practice of medicine.

Exasperated by the outrages of the dramatic poets, on virtue and
decency, Jeremy Collier, a non-juring clergyman, attacked the stage. His
charge against the authors was unquestionably right; but his attack upon
the stage itself, exhibited a disposition