uthor likewise took occasion to declaim against hunting, public
festivals, Christmas-keeping, bonfires, and may-poles. His zeal against
all these levities, he says, was first moved by observing that plays
sold better than the choicest sermons, and that they were frequently
printed on finer paper than the Bible itself. Besides, that the players
were often Papists, and desperately wicked; the play-houses, he affirms,
are Satan's chapels; the play-haunters little better than incarnate
devils; and so many steps in a dance, so many paces to hell. The chief
crime of Nero, he represents to have been his frequenting and acting of
plays; and those who nobly conspired his death, were principally moved
to it, as he affirms, by their indignation at that enormity. The rest of
his thousand pages is of a like strain. He had obtained a license from
Archbishop Abbot's chaplain; yet was he indicted in the star chamber as
a libeller. It was thought somewhat hard that general invectives against
plays should be interpreted into satires against the king and queen,
merely because they frequented these amusements, and because the
queen sometimes acted a part in pastorals and interludes which were
represented at court. The author, it must be owned, had, in plainer
terms, blamed the hierarchy, the ceremonies, the innovations in
religious worship, and the new superstitions introduced by Laud;[*]
and this, probably, together with the obstinacy and petulance of his
behavior before the star chamber, was the reason why his sentence was so
severe. He was condemned to be put from the bar; to stand on the pillory
in two places, Westminster and Cheapside; to lose both his ears, one
in each place; to pay five thousand pounds' fine to the king; and to be
imprisoned during life.[**]

This same Prynne was a great hero among the Puritans; and it was
chiefly with a view of mortifying that sect, that though of an honorable
profession, he was condemned by the star chamber to so ignominious a
punishment. The thorough-paced Puritans were distinguishable by the
sourness and austerity of their manners, and by their aversion to
all pleasure and society.[***] To inspire them with better humor was
certainly, both for their own sake and that of the public, a laudable
intention in the court; but whether pillories, fines and prisons were
proper expedients for that purpose, may admit of some question.

Another expedient which the king tried, in order to infuse cheerfulness