hands of every scholar, I shall content myself with merely referring to it. Many other Moralities are yet extant, of some of which I shall give titles below 1. Of one, which is not now extant, we have a curious account in a book entitled, Mount Tabor, or Private Exercises of a Penitent Sinner, by R. W. [R. Willis] Esqr. published in the year of his age 75, Anno Domini, 1639; an extract from which will give the reader a more accurate notion of the old Moralities than a long dissertation on the subject.

"UPON A STAGE-PLAY WHICH I SAW WHEN I WAS A CHILD.

"In the city of Gloucester the manner is, (as I think it is in other like corporations,) that when players of enterludes come to towne, they first attend the Mayor, to enforme him what noblemans servants they are, and so to get licence for their publike playing; and if the Mayor like the actors, or would shew respect to their lord and master, he appoints them to play their first play before himself, and the Alderman and Common-Counsell of the city; and that is called the Mayor's play: where every one that will, comes in without money, the Mayor giving the players a reward as hee thinks fit to shew respect unto them. At such a play, my father tooke me with him and made me stand between his leggs, as he sate upon one of the

1 Magnificence, written by John Skelton; Hycke Scorner, about 1520; Impatient Poverty, 1560; The Life and Repentance of Marie Magdalene, 1567; The Trial of Treasure, 1567; The Nice Wanton, 1568; The Disobedient Child, no date; The Marriage of Wit and Science, 1570; The Interlude of Youth, no date; The Longer thou Livest, the More Fool thou Art, no date; The Interlude of Wealth and Health, no date; All for Money, 1578; The Conflict of Conscience, 1581; The Three Ladies of London, 1584; The Three Lords of London, 1590; Tom Tyler and his Wife, &c.

benches, where we saw and heard very well. The play was called The Cradle of Security 2, wherein was personated a king or some great prince, with his courtiers of several kinds, among which three ladies were in special grace with him; and they keeping him in delights and pleasures, drew him from his graver counsellors, hearing of sermons, and listening to good councell and admonitions, that in the end they got him to lye down in a cradle upon the stage, where these three ladies joyning in a sweet song, rocked him asleepe, that he snorted againe; and in the mean time closely conveyed under the cloaths wherewithall he was covered, a vizard, like a swines snout, upon his face, with three wire chains fastened thereunto, the other end whereof being holden severally by those three ladies; who fall to singing againe, and then discovered his face that the spectators might see how they had transformed him, going on with their singing. Whilst all this was acting, there came forth of another doore at the farthest end of the stage, two old men; the one in blew, with a serjeant at armes his mace on his shoulder; the other in red, with a drawn sword in his hand, and leaning with the other hand upon the others shoulder; and so they went along with a soft pace round about by the skirt of the stage, till at last they came to the cradle, when all the court was in the greatest jollity; and then the foremost old man with his mace stroke a fearfull blow upon the cradle; wherewith all the courtiers, with the three ladies, and the vizard, all vanished; and the desolate prince starting up bare-faced, and finding himself thus sent for to judgement, made a lamentable complaint of his miserable case, and so was carried away by wicked spirits. This prince did personate

The Cradle of Securitie is mentioned with several other Moralities, in a play which has not been printed, entitled Sir Thomas More, MSS, Harl. 3768.

in the Morall, the wicked of the world; the three ladies, Pride, Covetousness, and Luxury; the two old men, the end of the world, and the last judgement. This sight took such impression in me, that when I came towards mans estate, it was as fresh in my memory, as if I had seen it newly acted 3.”

The writer of this book appears to have been born in the same year with our great poet (1564). Supposing him to have been seven or eight years old when he saw this interlude, the exhibition must have been in 1571 or 1572.

I am unable to ascertain when the first Morality appeared, but incline to think not sooner than the reign of King Edward the Fourth (1460). The publick pageants of the reign of King Henry the Sixth were uncommonly splendid; and being then first enlivened by the introduction of speaking allegorical personages properly and characteristically habited, they naturally led the way to those personifications by which Moralities were distinguished from the simpler religious dramas called Mysteries. We must not, however, suppose, that, after Moralities were introduced, Mysteries ceased to be exhibited. We have already seen that a Mystery was represented before King Henry the Seventh, at Winchester, in 1487. Sixteen years afterwards, on the first Sunday after the marriage of his daughter with King James of Scotland, a Morality was performed. In the early

3 Mount Tabor, &c. 8vo. 1659, pp. 110, et seq. With this curious extract I was favoured, several years ago, by the Rev. Mr. Bowle of Idmiston near Salisbury.

4 See Warton's History of English Poetry, vol. ii. p. 199.

5 Sir James Ware, in his Annales Rerum Hibernicarum, folio, 1664, after having given an account of the statute, 33 Henry VIII. c. i. by which Henry was declared King of Ireland, and Ireland made a kingdom, informs us, that the new law was proclaimed in St. Patrick's church, in the presence of the Lord Deputy St. Leger, and a great number of Peers, who attended in their parliament robes. "It is needless," he adds, to mention the feasts,

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part of the reign of King Henry the Eighth, they were perhaps performed indiscriminately; but Mys

comedies, and sports which followed." "Epulas, comedias, et certamina ludicra, quæ sequebantur, quid' attinet dicere?" The mention of comedies might lead us to suppose that our sister kingdom had gone before us in the cultivation of the drama; but I find from a MS. in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, that what are here called Comedies, were nothing more than Pageants. "In the parliament of 1541," says the author of the memoir, "wherein Henry VIII. was declared king of Ireland, there were present the earls of Ormond and Desmond, the lord Barry, M'Gilla Phædrig, chieftaine of Ossory, the son of O'Bryan, M'Carthy More, with many Irish lords; and on Corpus Christi day they rode about the streets in their parliament-robes, and the Nine Worthies was played, and the Mayor bore the mace before the deputy on horseback."

Two of Bale's Mysteries, God's Promises, and St. John Baptist, we have been lately told, were acted by young men at the marketcross in Kilkenny, on a Sunday, in the year 1552. See Walker's Essay on the Irish Stage, 4to. 1789, and Collect. de Rebus Hiber. vol. ii. p. 388: but there is a slight error in the date. Bale has himself informed us, that he was consecrated Bishop of Ossory, February 2, 1552-3, (not on the 25th of March, as the writer of Bale's Life in Biographia Britannica asserts,) and that he soon afterwards went to his palace in Kilkenny. These Mysteries were exhibited there on the 20th of August, 1553, the day on which Queen Mary was proclaimed, as appears from his own account : "On the xx daye of August was the ladye Marye with us at Kilkennye proclaimed Quene of England, &c.-The yonge men in the forenone played a tragedy of Gods Promises in the Old Lawe, at the market-crosse, with organe-plainges and songes, very aptely. In the afternone agayne they played a comedie of Sancte Johan Baptistes preachinges, of Christes baptisynge, and of his temptacion in the wildernesse, to the small contentacion of the prestes and other papistes there." The Vocacyon of Johan Bale, 16mo. no date, sign. C 8.

The only theatre in Dublin in the reign of Queen Elizabeth was a booth (if it may be called a theatre) erected in Hoggin Green, now College Green, where Mysteries and Moralities were occasionally performed. It is strange, that so lately as in the year 1600, at a time when many of Shakspeare's plays had been exhibited in England, and Lord Montjoy, the intimate friend of his patrons Lord Essex and Lord Southampton, was Deputy of Ireland, the old play of Gorboduck, written in the infancy of the stage, (for this piece had been originally presented in 1562, under

teries were probably seldom represented after the statute 34 and 35 Henry VIII. c. 1, which was made, as the preamble informs us, with a view that the kingdom should be purged and cleansed of all religious plays, interludes, rhymes, ballads, and songs, which are equally pestiferous and noysome to the commonweal. At this time both Moralities and Mysteries were made the vehicle of religious controversy; Bale's Comedy of the Three Laws of Nature, printed in 1538, (which in fact is a Mystery,) being a disguised satire against popery; as the Morality of Lusty Juventus was written expressly with the same view in the reign of King Edward the Sixth. In that of the name of Ferrex and Porrex,) should have been performed at the Castle of Dublin: but such is the fact, if we may believe Chetwood the prompter, who mentions that old Mr. Ashbury had seen a bill dated the 7th of September, 1601, (Queen Elizabeth's birth-day,) for wax tapers for the play of Gorboduck done at the Castle, one and twenty shillings and two groats.' Whether any plays were represented in Dublin in the reign of James the First, I am unable to ascertain. Barnaby Riche, who has given a curious account of Dublin, in the year 1610, makes no mention of any theatrical exhibition. In 1635, when Lord Strafford was Lord Lieutenant, a theatre, probably under his patronage, was built in Werbergh Street; which, under the conduct of the wellknown John Ogilby, Master of the Revels in Ireland, continued open till October 1641, when it was shut up by order of the Lords Justices. At this theatre, Shirley's Royal Master was originally represented in 1639, and Burnel's Landgartha in 1641. In 1662 Ogilby was restored to his office, and a new theatre was erected in Orange Street, (since called Smock Alley,) part of which fell down in the year 1671. Agrippa, King of Alba, a tragedy translated from the French of Quinault, was acted there before the Duke of Ormond, in 1675; and it continued open, I believe, till the death of King Charles the Second. The disturbances which followed in Ireland put an end for a time to all theatrical entertainments.

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6 "This mode of attack" (as Mr. Warton has observed) seldom returned by the opposite party: the catholick worship founded on sensible representations afforded a much better hold for ridicule, than the religion of some of the sects of the reformers, which was of a more simple and spiritual nature." History of English Poetry, vol. ii. p. 378, n. The interlude, however, called