others in other sums."

THE HISTORY OF THE THEATRE DURING ITS SUPPRESSION.

A period in our dramatic annals has been passed over during the progress
of the civil wars, which indeed was one of silence, but not of repose in
the theatre. It lasted beyond the death of Charles the First, when the
fine arts seemed also to have suffered with the monarch. The theatre,
for the first time in any nation, was abolished by a public ordinance,
and the actors, and consequently all that family of genius who by their
labours or their tastes are connected with the drama, were reduced to
silence. The actors were forcibly dispersed, and became even some of the
most persecuted objects of the new government.

It may excite our curiosity to trace the hidden footsteps of this
numerous fraternity of genius. Hypocrisy and Fanaticism had, at length,
triumphed over Wit and Satire. A single blow could not, however,
annihilate those never-dying powers; nor is suppression always
extinction. Reduced to a state which did not allow of uniting in a body,
still their habits and their affections could not desert them: actors
would attempt to resume their functions, and the genius of the authors
and the tastes of the people would occasionally break out, though
scattered and concealed.

Mr. Gifford has noticed, in his introduction to Massinger, the noble
contrast between our actors at that time, with those of revolutionary
France, when, to use his own emphatic expression--"One wretched actor
only deserted his sovereign; while of the vast multitude fostered by the
nobility and the royal family of France, not one individual adhered to
their cause: all rushed madly forward to plunder and assassinate their
benefactors."

The contrast is striking, but the result must be traced to a different
principle; for the cases are not parallel as they appear. The French
actors did not occupy the same ground as ours. Here, the fanatics shut
up the theatre, and extirpated the art and the artists: there, the
fanatics enthusiastically converted the theatre into an instrument of
their own revolution, and the French actors therefore found an increased
national patronage. It was natural enough that actors would not desert a
flourishing profession. "The plunder and assassinations," indeed, were
quite peculiar to themselves as Frenchmen, not as actors.

The destruction of the theatre here was the result of an ancient quarrel
between the puritanic party and the whole _