May games, stage-plays, * fairs, and the various pastimes that delighted the commonalty, were sternly prohibited. The heart sickens at the cant and cruelty of these monstrous times, when fanaticism, with a dagger in one hand, and “_Hooks and Eyes for an Unbeliever's Breeches_,” in the other, revelled in the destruction of all that was intellectual in the land. * Plays were suppressed by the Puritans in 1633. The actors were driven off the stage by the soldiers; and the only pleasantry that Messrs. “Praise-God-Barebones” and “Fight- the-good-fight,” indulged in, was “Enter red coat, exit hat and cloak;” a cant phrase in reference to this devout tyranny. Randolph, in “The Muses' Looking-glass,” makes a fanatic utter this charitable prayer: “That the Globe, Wherein (quoth he) reigns a whole world of vice, Had been consum'd, the Phoenix burnt to ashes; The Fortune whipp'd for a blind--Blackfriars! He wonders how it 'scap'd demolishing I' the time of Reformation: lastly, he wished The Bull might cross the Thames to the Bear Gardens, And there be soundly baited. In 1599 was published “The overthrow of Stage Playes, by way of controversie betwixt D. Gager and D. Rainolde, where- in all the Reasons that ean be made for them are notably refuted, the objections answered, and the case so clear and resolved as that the judgment of any man that is not froward and perverse may casilic be satisfied; wherein is manifestly proved that it is not onely unlawfull to bee an actor, but a beholder of those vanities, &e. &c.” When the lute, the virginals, the viol-de-gambo, were hushed for the inharmonious bray of their miserable conventicles, * and the quaintly appropriate signs ** of the ancient taverns and music shops were pulled down to make room for some such horrible effigy as we see dedicated to their high priest, _John Knox_, on a wall in the odoriferous Canongate of _Modern Athens_. *** * “What a poor pimping business is a Presbyterian place of worship; dirty, narrow and squalid: stuck in the corner of an old Popish garden such as Linlithgow, and much more, Melrose.”--Robert Burns. ** Two wooden heads, with this inscription under it: “We three loggerheads be.” The third was the spectator. The tabor was the ancient sign of a music shop. Tarleton kept an eating-house with this sign. Apropos of signs--Two Irishmen beholding a hatchment fixed against a house, the one inquired what it was? “It's a bad sign!” replied the other mysteriously. Paddy being still at fault as to the meaning, asked for further explanation.--“It's a sign,” cried his companion with a look of immeasurable superiority, “that somebody is dead!”