But were these plays objectionable? As far as the comedies are concerned, that will depend on the answer to the question, Are plays objectionable, the staple subject of which is adultery? Now, we cannot but agree with the Puritans, that adultery is not a subject for comedy at all. It may be for tragedy; but for comedy never. It is a sin; not merely theologically, but socially, one of the very worst sins, the parent of seven other sins,—of falsehood, suspicion, hate, murder, and a whole bevy of devils. The prevalence of adultery in any country has always been a sign and a cause of social insincerity, division, and revolution; where a people has learnt to connive and laugh at it, and to treat it as a light thing, that people has been always careless, base, selfish, cowardly,—ripe for slavery. And we must say that either the courtiers and Londoners of James and Charles the First were in that state, or that the poets were doing their best to make them so. We shall not shock our readers by any details on this point; we shall only say that there is hardly a comedy of the seventeenth century, with the exception of Shakspeare’s, in which adultery is not introduced as a subject of laughter, and often made the staple of the whole plot. The seducer is, if not openly applauded, at least let to pass as a ‘handsome gentleman’; the injured husband is, as in that Italian literature of which we shall speak shortly, the object of every kind of scorn and ridicule. In this latter habit (common to most European nations) there is a sort of justice. A man can generally retain his wife’s affections if he will behave himself like a man; and ‘injured husbands’ have for the most part no one to blame but themselves. But the matter is not a subject for comedy; not even in that case which has been always too common in France, Italy, and the Romish countries, and which seems to have been painfully common in England in the seventeenth century, when, by a _mariage de convenance_, a young girl is married up to a rich idiot or a decrepit old man. Such things are not comedies, but tragedies; subjects for pity and for silence, not for brutal ribaldry. Therefore the men who look on them in the light which the Stuart dramatists looked are not good men, and do no good service to the country; especially when they erect adultery into a science, and seem to take a perverse pleasure in teaching their audience every possible method, accident, cause, and consequence of it; always, too, when they have an opportunity, pointing ‘Eastward Ho!’ _i.e._ to the city of London, as the quarter where court gallants can find boundless indulgence for their passions amid the fair wives of dull and cowardly citizens. If the citizens drove the players out of London, the playwrights took good care to have their revenge. The citizen is their standard butt. These shallow parasites, and their shallower sovereigns, seem to have taken a perverse and, as it happened,