‘We have now,’ says a contemporary letter-writer, ‘got a playhouse set up here in the Tennis Court, to the great grief of all sober good people; and I am surprised to see such diversions as tend so much to corrupt men’s manners patronised and countenanced by some of whom I expected better things.... Mr Webster and several other ministers have given a testimony against them; and for so doing are mocked by a great many that |1715.| you would scarce suspect. Particularly, Mr Webster is very much cried out against for saying no more but that whoever in his parish did attend these plays should be refused tokens to the sacrament of the Supper.’[[470]]
The presbytery of Edinburgh was alive to the danger of allowing stage-plays to be acted within their borders, and adverted to the Canongate theatricals in great concern on the 23d of March 1715. ‘Being informed,’ they said, ‘that some comedians have lately come to the bounds of this presbytery, and do act within the precincts of the Abbey, to the great offence of many, by trespassing upon morality and those rules of modesty and chastity which our holy religion obligeth all its professors to a strict observance of, therefore the presbytery recommends to all their members to use all proper and prudent methods to discourage the same.’[[471]] It is at the same time rather startling to find that three of the ministers who went as a deputation to pay the respects of the Church of Scotland to George I. on his accession in 1714—namely, Mitchell, Ramsay, and Hart—went at Kendal to see the comedy of Love for Love acted.
Apr. 22.
A celebrated total eclipse of the sun, which happened about nine o’clock in the morning of this day, made a great impression in Scotland, as in other parts of Europe, over which the entire shadow passed. The darkness lasted upwards of three minutes, during which the usual phenomena were observed among the lower animals. The Edinburgh bard, Allan Ramsay, heralded the event with a set of verses, embracing all the commonplaces connected with it; adding,
‘The unlearned clowns, who don’t our era know,
From this dark Friday will their ages shew,
As I have often heard old country men
Talk of Dark Monday[[472]] and their ages then.’
Whiston, in his Memoirs, relates what will be to philosophical persons an amusing anecdote of this eclipse. When the accounts of it were published beforehand in the streets of London, telling when it would commence, and that it would be total, a Mohammedan envoy, from Tripoli, thought the English people were distracted |1715.| in pretending to know what God Almighty would do; which his own countrymen could not do. ‘He concluded thus, that God Almighty would never reveal so great a secret to us unbelievers, when he did not reveal it to those whom he esteemed true believers. However, when the eclipse came exactly as we all foretold, he was asked again what he thought of the matter now; his answer was, that he supposed we knew this by art magique; otherwise he must have turned Christian upon such an extraordinary event as this was.’
July.