“The fair sat panting at a courtier’s play, And not a mask went unimproved away.” The London theatres then presented a spectacle which ought for ever to put to silence the foolish outcry against progressive deterioration of morals,--foolish even from the pen of Juvenal, and still more so from the lips of a modern Puritan. Vice is always nearly on an average: The only difference in life worth tracing, is that of manners, and there we have manifestly the advantage of our ancestors. Hypocrisy is said to be the homage that vice pays to virtue,--decorum is the outward expression of that homage; and if this be so, we must acknowledge that vice has latterly grown very humble indeed. There was, however, something splendid, ostentatious, and obtrusive, in the vices of Charles the Second’s reign.--A view of the theatres alone proved it, when Stanton was in the habit of visiting them. At the doors stood on one side the footmen of a fashionable nobleman, (with arms concealed under their liveries), surrounding the sedan of a popular actress(1), whom they were to carry off _vi et armis_, as she entered it at the end of the play. At the other side waited the _glass coach_ of a woman of fashion, who waited to take Kynaston (the Adonis of the day), in his female dress, to the park after the play was over, and exhibit him in all the luxurious splendour of effeminate beauty, (heightened by theatrical dress), for which he was so distinguished. (1) Mrs Marshall, the original Roxana in Lee’s Alexander, and the only virtuous woman then on the stage. She was carried off in the manner described, by Lord Orrery, who, finding all his solicitations repelled, had recourse to a sham marriage performed by a servant in the habit of a clergyman. Plays being then performed at four o’clock, allowed ample time for the evening drive, and the midnight assignation, when the parties met by torch-light, masked, in St James’s park, and verified the title of Wycherly’s play, “Love in a Wood.” The boxes, as Stanton looked round him, were filled with females, whose naked shoulders and bosoms, well testified in the paintings of Lely, and the pages of Grammont, might save modern puritanism many a vituperative groan and affected reminiscence. They had all taken the precaution to send some male relative, on the first night of a new play, to report whether it was fit for persons of “honour and reputation” to appear at; but in spite of this precaution, at certain passages (which occurred about every second sentence) they were compelled to spread out their fans, or play with the still cherished love-lock, which Prynne himself had not been able to write down.