The English have even been reproached with paying too extravagant honours to mere merit,and censured for interring the celebrated actress Mrs.Oldfield in Westminster Abbey,with almost the same pomp as Sir Isaac Newton.Some pretend that the English had paid her these great funeral honours,purposely to make us more strongly sensible of the barbarity and injustice which they object to us,for having buried Mademoiselle Le Couvreur ignominiously in the fields.
But be assured from me,that the English were prompted by no other principle in burying Mrs.Oldfield in Westminster Abbey than their good sense.They are far from being so ridiculous as to brand with infamy an art which has immortalised a Euripides and a Sophocles;or to exclude from the body of their citizens a set of people whose business is to set off with the utmost grace of speech and action those pieces which the nation is proud of.
Under the reign of Charles I.and in the beginning of the civil wars raised by a number of rigid fanatics,who at last were the victims to it;a great many pieces were published against theatrical and other shows,which were attacked with the greater virulence because that monarch and his queen,daughter to Henry I.of France,were passionately fond of them.
One Mr.Prynne,a man of most furiously scrupulous principles,who would have thought himself damned had he worn a cassock instead of a short cloak,and have been glad to see one-half of mankind cut the other to pieces for the glory of God,and the Propaganda Fide;took it into his head to write a most wretched satire against some pretty good comedies,which were exhibited very innocently every night before their majesties.He quoted the authority of the Rabbis,and some passages from St.Bonaventure,to prove that the OEdipus of Sophocles was the work of the evil spirit;that Terence was excommunicated ipso facto;and added,that doubtless Brutus,who was a very severe Jansenist,assassinated Julius Caesar for no other reason but because he,who was Pontifex Maximus,presumed to write a tragedy the subject of which was OEdipus.Lastly,he declared that all who frequented the theatre were excommunicated,as they thereby renounced their baptism.This was casting the highest insult on the king and all the royal family;and as the English loved their prince at that time,they could not bear to hear a writer talk of excommunicating him,though they themselves afterwards cut his head off.Prynne was summoned to appear before the Star Chamber;his wonderful book,from which Father Le Brun stole his,was sentenced to be burnt by the common hangman,and himself to lose his ears.
His trial is now extant.
The Italians are far from attempting to cast a blemish on the opera,or to excommunicate Signor Senesino or Signora Cuzzoni.With regard to myself,I could presume to wish that the magistrates would suppress I know not what contemptible pieces written against the stage.For when the English and Italians hear that we brand with the greatest mark of infamy an art in which we excel;that we excommunicate persons who receive salaries from the king;that we condemn as impious a spectacle exhibited in convents and monasteries;that we dishonour sports in which Louis XIV.and Louis XV.,performed as actors;that we give the title of the devil's works to pieces which are received by magistrates of the most severe character,and represented before a virtuous queen;when,I say,foreigners are told of this insolent conduct,this contempt for the royal authority,and this Gothic rusticity which some presume to call Christian severity,what an idea must they entertain of our nation?And how will it be possible for them to conceive,either that our laws give a sanction to an art which is declared infamous,or that some persons dare to stamp with infamy an art which receives a sanction from the laws,is rewarded by kings,cultivated and encouraged by the greatest men,and admired by whole nations?And that Father Le Brun's impertinent libel against the stage is seen in a bookseller's shop,standing the very next to the immortal labours of Racine,of Corneille,of Moliere,&c.
