It requires not much thought to
discover the poisonous influence of such plays. A young man of figure,
emancipated at last from the severity and restraint of a college
education, repairs to the capital disposed to every sort of excess. The
play-house becomes his favourite amusement, and he is enchanted with the
gaiety and splendour of the chief personages. The disgust which vice
gives him at first, soon wears off to make way for new notions, more
liberal in his opinion, by which a sovereign contempt of religion, and a
declared war upon the chastity of wives, maids and widows, are converted
from being infamous vices to be fashionable virtues. The infection
spreads gradually through all ranks and becomes universal. How gladly
would I listen to any one, who should undertake to prove, that what I
have been describing is chimerical! But the dissoluteness of our young
men of birth will not suffer me to doubt its reality. Sir Harry Wildair
has completed many a rake; and in the suspicious husband, Ranger, the
humble imitator of Sir Harry, has had no slight influence in spreading
that character. What woman, tinctured with the play-house morals, would
not be the sprightly, the witty, though dissolute Lady Townley, rather
than the cold, the sober, though virtuous Lady Grace? How odious ought
writers to be who thus employ the talents they have from their maker
most traitorously against himself, by endeavouring to corrupt and
disfigure his creatures! If the comedies of Congreve did not rack him
with remorse in his last moments, he must have been lost to all sense of
virtue.
Pages:
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102