Not that the poets or the players had any conscious intention of demoralising their hearers, any more than they had of correcting them. We will lay on them the blame of no special _malus animus_: but, at the same time, we must treat their fine words about ‘holding a mirror up to vice,’ and ‘showing the age its own deformity,’ as mere cant, which the men themselves must have spoken tongue in cheek. It was as much an insincere cant in those days as it was when, two generations later, Jeremy Collier exposed its falsehood in the mouth of Congreve. If the poets had really intended to show vice its own deformity, they would have represented it (as Shakspeare always does) as punished, and not as triumphant. It is ridiculous to talk of moral purpose in works in which there is no moral justice. The only condition which can excuse the representation of evil is omitted. The simple fact is that the poets wanted to draw a house; that this could most easily be done by the coarsest and most violent means; and that not being often able to find stories exciting enough in the past records of sober English society, they went to Italy and Spain for the violent passions and wild crimes of southern temperaments, excited, and yet left lawless, by a superstition believed in enough to darken and brutalise, but not enough to control, its victims. Those were the countries which just then furnished that strange mixture of inward savagery with outward civilisation, which is the immoral playwright’s fittest material; because, while the inward savagery moves the passions of the audience, the outward civilisation brings the character near enough to them to give them a likeness of themselves in their worst moments, such as no ‘Mystery of Cain’ or ‘Tragedy of Prometheus’ can give. Does this seem too severe in the eyes of those who value the drama for its lessons in human nature? On that special point something must be said hereafter. Meanwhile, hear one of the sixteenth century poets; one who cannot be suspected of any leaning toward Puritanism; one who had as high notions of his vocation as any man; and one who so far fulfilled those notions as to become a dramatist inferior only to Shakspeare. Let Ben Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to ‘Volpone’ tell us in his own noble prose what he thought of the average morality of his contemporary playwrights:—