things in man, and more excuses for man, than were dreamt of in
Prynne's philosophy, were the Jesuit Casuists, who, by a fatal
perverseness, used all their little knowledge of human nature to the
same undesirable purpose as the playwrights; namely, to prove how it
was possible to commit every conceivable sinful action without
sinning. No wonder that in an age in which courtiers and theatre-
haunters were turning Romanists by the dozen, and the priest-ridden
queen was the chief patroness of the theatre, the Puritans should
have classed players and Jesuits in the same category, and deduced
the parentage of both alike from the father of lies.

But as for these Puritans having been merely the sour, narrow,
inhuman persons they are vulgarly supposed to have been, credat
Judaeus. There were sour and narrow men among them; so there were in
the opposite party. No Puritan could have had less poetry in him,
less taste, less feeling, than Laud himself. But is there no poetry
save words? No drama save that which is presented on the stage? Is
this glorious earth, and the souls of living men, mere prose, as long
as 'carent vate sacro,' who will, forsooth, do them the honour to
make poetry out of a little of them (and of how little!) by
translating them into words, which he himself, just in proportion as
he is a good poet, will confess to be clumsy, tawdry, ineffectual?
Was there no poetry in these Puritans because they wrote no poetry?
We do not mean now the unwritten tragedy of the battle-psalm and the
charge; but simple idyllic poetry and quiet home-drama, love-poetry
of the heart and the hearth, and the beauties of everyday human life.
Take the most commonplace of them: was Zeal-for-Truth Thoresby, of
Thoresby Rise in Deeping Fen, because his father had thought fit to
give him an ugly and silly name, the less of a noble lad? Did his
name prevent his being six feet high? Were his shoulders the less