Against the revived fashion of licentious plays, some of the wisest men among theatrical audiences protested loudly. No man raised his voice with greater urgency than Evelyn. Within six years of the Restoration, he, who was in frequency of playgoing only second to Pepys, but as sharp an observer and a graver censor than the Admiralty clerk, addressed a letter to Lord Cornbury on this important subject. The letter was written a few weeks previous to the Lent season of 1665, and the writer mourns over a scandal less allowed in any city of Christendom, than in the metropolis of England, namely--"the frequency of our theatrical pastimes during the indiction of Lent. Here in London," he says, "there were more wicked and obscene plays permitted than in all the world besides. At Paris three days, at Rome two weekly, and at the other cities, Florence, Venice, &c., only at certain jolly periods of the year, and that not without some considerable emolument to the public, while our interludes here are every day alike; so as the ladies and the gallants come reeking from the play _late on Saturday night_" (was Saturday then a fashionable day for late performances?) "to their Sunday devotions; and the ideas of the farce possess their fancies to the infinite prejudice of devotion, besides the advantages it gives to our reproachful blasphemers." Evelyn, however, does not pursue his statement to a logical conclusion. He proposes to close the houses on Friday and Saturday, or to represent plays on these nights only for the benefit of paupers in or out of the workhouses. Remembering rather the actresses who disgraced womanhood, than such an exemplary and reproachless pair as Betterton and his wife, he recommends robbery of the "debauched comedians," as he calls them, without scruple. What if they be despoiled of a hundred or so a year? They will still enjoy more than they were ever born to; and the sacrifice, he quaintly says, will consecrate their scarce allowable impertinences. He adds, with a seriousness which implies his censure of the royal approval of the bad taste which had brought degradation on the stage--"Plays are now with us become a licentious excess, and a vice, and need severe censors, that should look as well to their morality as to their lines and numbers."