sity, rather than from choice; for the boys who had been
trained to act female characters before the Rebellion, during the
present suspension of the theatre, had grown too masculine to resume
their tender office at the Restoration; and, as the same poet observes,

Doubting we should never play agen,
We have played all our _women_ into _men_;

so that the introduction of women was the mere result of
necessity:--hence all these apologies for the most natural ornament of
the stage.[151]

This volume of Reynolds seems to have been the shadow and precursor of
one of the most substantial of literary monsters, in the tremendous
"Histriomastix, or Player's Scourge," of Prynne, in 1633. In that
volume, of more than a thousand closely-printed quarto pages, all that
was ever written against plays and players, perhaps, may be found: what
followed could only have been transcripts from a genius who could raise
at once the Mountain and the Mouse. Yet Collier, so late as in 1698,
renewed the attack still more vigorously, and with final success;
although he left room for Arthur Bedford a few years afterwards, in his
"Evil and Danger of Stage-plays:" in which extraordinary work he
produced "seven thousand instances, taken out of plays of the present
century;" and a catalogue of "fourteen hundred texts of scripture,
ridiculed by the Stage." This religious anti-dramatist must have been
more deeply read in the drama than even its most fervent lovers. His
piety pursued too deeply the study of such impious productions; and such
labours were probably not without more amusement than he ought to have
found in them.

This stage persecution, which began in the reign of Elizabeth, had been
necessarily resented by the theatrical people, and the fanatics were
really objects too tempting for the traders in wit and satire to pass
by. They had made themselves very marketable; and the puritans, changing
their character with the times, from Elizabeth to Charles the First,
were often the _Tartuffes_ of the stage.[152] But when they became the
government itself, in 1642, all the theatres were suppressed, because
"stage-plaies do not suit with seasons of humiliation; but fasting and
praying have been found very effectual." This was but a mild cant, and
the suppression, at first, was only to be temporary. But as they gained
strength, the hypocrite, who had at first only struck a gentle blow at
the theatre, with redoubled vengeance buried it in its