life and progress of scenery on our stage; which, without doubt, gives
greater life to the entertainment of a play; but as the best purposes
may be prostituted, so there is some reason to believe that the
excessive fondness for decorations, which now prevails, has hurt the
true dramatic taste. Scenes are to be considered as secondary in a
play, the means of setting it off with lustre, and ought to engross
but little attention; as it is more important to hear what a character
speaks, than to observe the place where he stands; but now the case is
altered. The scenes in a Harlequin Sorcerer, and other unmeaning
pantomimes, unknown to our more elegant and judging fore-fathers,
procure crowded houses, while the noblest strokes of Dryden, the
delicate touches of Otway and Rowe, the wild majesty of Shakespear,
and the heart-felt language of Lee, pass neglected, when put in
competition with those gewgaws of the stage, these feasts of the eye;
which as they can communicate no ideas, so they can neither warm nor
reform the heart, nor answer one moral purpose in nature.

We ought not to omit a cirrumstance much in favour of Sir William
Davenant, which proves him to have been as good a man as a poet. When
at the Restoration, those who had been active in disturbing the late
reign, and secluding their sovereign from the throne, became obnoxious
to the royal party, Milton was likely to feel the vengeance of the
court, Davenant actuated by a noble principle of gratitude, interposed
all his influence, and saved the greatest ornament of the world from
the stroke of an executioner. Ten years before that, Davenant had been
rescued by Milton, and he remembered the favour; an instance, this,
that generosity, gratitude, and nobleness of nature is confined to no
particular party; but the heart of a good man will still discover
itself in acts of munificence and kindness, however mistaken he may be
in his opinion, however warm in state factions. The particulars of