A glance at the dedication of ‘The Nonjuror’ to the king will not be superfluous. It will throw light on more than one illustration of this Jacobite time. Cibber addresses the king as ‘Dread Sir,’ and calls himself ‘the lowest of your Subjects.’ He justifies his political comedy as a proof ‘what honest and laudable uses may be made of the Theatre, when its performances keep close to the true purpose of its Institution. It may be necessary,’ he says, ‘to divert the sullen and disaffected from busying their brains to disturb the happiness of a government which (for want of proper amusements) they often enter into wild and seditious schemes to reform.’ Colley then reminds the king that the stage was never suppressed in England ‘but by those very people that turned our Church and Constitution into Irreligion and Anarchy.’ The Jacobites (by the way) might readily accept this remark, seeing the ‘people’ who overset Church and King, and established Irreligion and Anarchy, were the ‘Whigs’ of that day who slew the royal grandfather of that ‘Chevalier whom the Jacobites of the present time hoped to set up as their lawful king. Cibber professed to have made these Jacobites ridiculous, in ‘The Nonjuror,’ in order to make them ashamed of their cause! He affected to deplore that this loyal work had nobody better than ‘a Comedian’ for its author. In such an undertaking by such a low personage, his wise Majesty might discern an ‘unlicensed boldness.’ Yet, the undertaking exposes ‘rebellious and unchristian tenets.’――Colley takes further comfort in the following Cibberian style: ‘Nay, I have yet a further hope, that it has even discovered the strength and number of the _Misguided_ to be much less than may have been artfully insinuated, there being no Assembly where People are so free and so apt to speak their minds as in a crowded Theatre; of which, Your Majesty may have lately seen an instance in the insuppressible Acclamations that were given on your appearing to honour this Play with your Royal presence.’ [Sidenote: _DEDICATION TO THE KING._] That was on the first night. The ‘irrepressible acclamations’ of the packed audience were still living in their echoes when the curtain rose for the Prologue. The king smiled when the house laughed aloud at the threat it contained that the play would treat the Jacobites roughly. Good breeding ne’er commands us to be civil To those who wish our Nation at the devil! The Whig faction thoroughly enjoyed the allusions to the Nonjuring parson, who rallied his flock in close back-rooms, reigned the patriarch of blind lanes and alleys, and who fulminated excommunications from London garrets. When the play began, Mrs. Oldfield and Booth, by their exquisite acting, almost made both factions overlook the political allusions. [Sidenote: _SIGNIFICANT PASSAGES._]