* For further particulars of Smith, see the "London
Directory."
** See Wright—who, by the way, was generally wrong—in his
"Historia Histrionica."
The Long Parliament put down all stage plays, for the miserable mummers of whom that assembly was composed were desirous of having all the acting to themselves, though they made a very poor burlesque of the parts of statesmen and patriots. It has been ingeniously suggested by Mr. Collier, in his History of Dramatic Poetry, that the Puritanical Parliament suppressed the drama and dramatists less on conscientious grounds than from the fear of being made the subject of well-merited satire. The same feeling which would urge a legislature of pickpockets to abolish the police might have actuated the Republicans in their zeal to get rid of that moral watch which a well regulated state will always keep over cant and villainy.
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If, however, dramatic performances were scarce during the ascendency of Cromwell and the Puritans, the public—had they known how to appreciate it—would not have been without food for mirth in the very ludicrous exhibitions which the events of the day were perpetually furnishing. The career of Cromwell himself might have suggested an amusing spectacle to those who are in the habit of turning to the ridiculous side of everything. A brewer on the throne, endeavouring to unite republican simplicity with royal state, presents to the imagination a figure almost as grotesque as that of an elephant on the tight-rope—an idea in which there is that rare combination of ponderosity and levity, which Cromwell's conduct on the protectorat elbow, or supreme arm-chair, will be found to have realised. His unwieldy gambols and great preponderance over all below him, were most fatal to that balance of power which can never be sustained without an equality of pressure and an equality of resistance on all sides.
Our survey of the literature of the seventeenth century would be incomplete if we were to omit to notice the 3rd of November, 1640, as being the date of the earliest English newspaper. It bore the name of the "Diurnal Occurrences; or, Daily Proceedings of Both Houses," but though it professed to give daily news, it was only a weekly periodical. There arose rapidly a provincial press, but its pretensions were slight, and News from Hull, Truths from York, Warranted Tidings from Ireland, were the names of some of the chief of these country newspapers. Their leading articles were not much in the style we are accustomed to at the present day; but the ancient order of penny-a-liners seemed to be ever agog for these precocious gooseberries, showers of frogs, and fading reminiscences of oldest inhabitants, that are still the staple of the productions of this humble class of contributors. It is a remarkable coincidence that the circulation of the blood and the circulation of newspapers should both have belonged to this period of our country's history.
Furniture and costume improved wonderfully in this age, and the wealthy became less chary of expense in their chairs, while they began to sleep on down, or, in other words, to feather their nests with great luxuriance. The clothes of the times of the two Charles's were made much too large for the wearers, and may be considered characteristic of the loose habits of the period. The hair was cut short by the Republican party, or Roundheads, in memory of whom the culprits at Clerkenwell and other prisons are cropped exceedingly close, though this is not the only point of resemblance between the modern rogues and the old regicides.
The condition of the people was not very enviable in the era we have described, and it is a remarkable as well as a most instructive fact, that commonwealth is usually synonymous with common poverty. Wages were invariably low, for a man-servant who could thrash a cornfield and kill a hog, received only fifty shillings per annum. Poverty and knavery, begging and filching, were at their height under the reign of the Puritans; for "Like master, like man" was at all times a proverb that could be thoroughly relied upon.