more and more becoming the fashion among well-bred women; and that
among them, too, the Puritan canons are gaining ground.

We have just said that the Puritans held too exclusively to one pole
of a double truth. They did so, no doubt, in their hatred of the
drama. Their belief that human relations were, if not exactly
sinful, at least altogether carnal and unspiritual, prevented their
conceiving the possibility of any truly Christian drama; and led them
at times into strange and sad errors, like that New England ukase of
Cotton Mather's, who is said to have punished the woman who should
kiss her infant on the Sabbath day. Yet their extravagances on this
point were but the honest revulsion from other extravagances on the
opposite side. If the undistinguishing and immoral Autotheism of the
playwrights, and the luxury and heathendom of the higher classes,
first in Italy and then in England, were the natural revolt of the
human mind against the Manichaeism of monkery: then the severity and
exclusiveness of Puritanism was a natural and necessary revolt
against that luxury and immorality; a protest for man's God-given
superiority over nature, against that Naturalism which threatened to
end in sheer animalism. While Italian prelates have found an
apologist in Mr. Roscoe, and English playwrights in Mr. Gifford, the
old Puritans, who felt and asserted, however extravagantly, that
there was an eternal law which was above all Borgias and Machiavels,
Stuarts and Fletchers, have surely a right to a fair trial. If they
went too far in their contempt for humanity, certainly no one
interfered to set them right. The Anglicans of that time, who held
intrinsically the same anthropologic notions, and yet wanted the
courage and sincerity to carry them out as honestly, neither could
nor would throw any light upon the controversy; and the only class
who sided with the poor playwrights in asserting that there were more