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and much of his nights to the service of some cause or country, all the while firmly believing his life indispensable to the success of the cause, the prosperity of the country; and he dies, and the cause and the country go on just the same.

CHAPTER XXVII.

'ROGUES AND VAGABONDS.'

THE Condition of the English stage became a subject of some anxiety about this time, and was made the occasion for the introduction of an important Act of Parliament. The reader of to-day, looking back on the dramatic literature of the second George's reign, would not be apt to think that it called for special measures of restriction. The vices of the Restoration period had apparently worked out their own cure. The hideous indecency of Dryden, of Wycherley, and of Vanbrugh had brought about a certain reaction. The indecency of such authors as these was not merely a coarseness of expression such as most of the Elizabethan writers freely indulged in, and which has but little to do with the deeper questions of morality. Nor did its evil consist merely in the choice of subjects which are painful to study, and of questionable influence on the mind. Many of the finest plays of Ford and Massinger and Webster turn on sins and crimes, the mere study of which it might reasonably be contended must always have the effect of disturbing the moral sense, if not of actually depraving the mind. But no one can pretend to find

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in the best of the Elizabethan writers any sympathy with viciousness, any stimulus to immorality. Of the Restoration authors, in general, the very contrary has to be said. They revel in uncleanness; they glorify immorality. It is the triumph and the honour of a gentleman to seduce his friend's wife or his neighbour's daughter. The business and the glory of men is the seduction of women. The sympathy of the dramatic author and his readers. goes always with the seducer. The husband of the faithless wife is a subject of inextinguishable merriment and laughter. His own friends are made to laugh at him, and to feel a genuine delight in his suffering and his shame. The question of morality altogether apart, it seems positively wonderful to an English reader of to-day why the writers of the Restoration period should have always felt such an exuberant joy in the thought that a man's wife was unfaithful to him. The common feeling of all men, even the men meant to be best, in the plays of Wycherley and Vanbrugh, seems one that might find expression in some such words as these: I should like to seduce every pretty married woman if I could, but if I have not time or chance for such delight it is at least a great pleasure and comfort to me to know that she has been seduced by somebody; it is always a source of glee to me to know that a husband has been deceived; and, if the husband himself comes to know it too, that makes my joy all the greater.' The delight in sin seems to have made men in a certain sinful sense unselfish. They delighted so in

vice that they were glad to hear of its existence even where it brought them no direct personal gratification.

All this had changed in the days of George the Second. There had been a gradual and marked improvement in the moral tone of the drama, unaccompanied, it must be owned, by any very decided improvement in the moral tone of society. Perhaps the main difference between the time of the Restoration and that of the early Georges is that the vice of the Restoration was wanton schoolboy vice, and that of the early Georges the vice of mature and practical men. In the Restoration time people delighted in showing off their viciousness and making a frolic and a parade of it; at the time of the Georges they took their profligacy in a quiet, practical, man-of-the-world sort of way, and made no work about it. One effect of this difference was felt in the greater decorum, the greater comparative decorum, of the Georgian drama.

Yet this was the time when Walpole thought it necessary to introduce a measure putting the stage under new and severe restrictions. Walpole himself cared nothing about literature, and nothing about the drama; and he was as little squeamish as man could possibly be in the matter of plain-spoken indecency. What troubled him was not the indecency of the stage, but its political innuendo. It never occurred to him to care whether anything said in Drury Lane or Covent Garden brought a blush to the cheek of any young person; but he was much

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concerned when he heard of anything said there which was likely to make people laugh at a certain elderly person. As we have seen, he had never got the best of it in the long war of pamphlets and squibs and epigrams and caricature. It was out of his power to hire penmen who could stand up against such antagonists as Swift and Bolingbroke and Pulteney. He was out of humour with the press; had been out of humour with it for a long time; and now he began to be out of humour with the stage. Indeed, it should rather be said that he was now falling into a new fit of ill-humour with the stage; for he had been very angry indeed with Gay for his Beggars' Opera,' and for the attempt at a continuation of The Beggars' Opera' in the yet more audacious Polly,' which brought in more money to Gay from its not having been allowed to get on the stage than its brilliant predecessor had done after all its unexampled run. The measure of Walpole's wrath was filled by the knowledge that a piece was in preparation in which he was to be held up to public ridicule in the rudest and most uncompromising way. Walpole acted with a certain boldness and cunning. The play was brought to him, was offered for sale to him. This was an audacious attempt at blackmailing; and at first it appeared to be successful. Walpole agreed to the terms, bought the play, paid the money, and then proceeded at once to make the fact that such a piece had been written, and but for his payment might have been played, an excuse for the introduction of a measure to put the whole English stage under restric