Part I, Chapter Ill. The Objections from Reason Answered.
The corruption of manners upon the Restoration appeared with all the fury of libertinism even before the playhouse was reëstablished, and long before it could have any influence on manners; so that another cause of that corruption is to be inquired after than the reestablishment of the drama; and that can be nothing but that beastly Reformation which, in the time of the late civil wars, was begun at the tail instead of the head and the heart; and which oppressed and persecuted men's inclinations instead of correcting and converting them, which afterwards broke out with the same violence that a raging fire does upon its first getting vent. And that which gave it so licentious a vent was not only the permission but the example of the court, which, for the most part, was just arrived from abroad with the king, where it had endeavored by foreign corruption to sweeten, or at least to soften, adversity, and having sojourned for a considerable time both at Paris and in the Low Countries, united the spirit of the French whoring to the fury of the Dutch drinking. So that the poets who wrote immediately after the Restoration were obliged to humour the depraved tastes of their audience. For as an impenitent sinner that should be immediately transported to heaven would be incapable of partaking of the happiness of the place, because his inclinations and affections would not be prepared for it; so if the poets of these times had written in a manner purely instructive, without any mixture of lewdness, the appetites of the audience were so far debauched that they would have judged the entertainment insipid; so that the spirit of libertinism which came in with the court and for which the people were so well prepared by the sham reformation of manners caused the lewdness of their plays, and not the lewdness of the plays the spirit of libertinism, For it is ridiculous to assign a cause of so long a standing to so new, so sudden, and so extraordinary an effect, when we may assign a cause so new, so probable, and unheard of before, as the inclinations of the people, returning with violence to their natural bent upon the encouragement and example of a court that was come home with all the corruptions of a foreign luxury; so that the sham Reformation being, in a great measure, the cause of that spirit of libertinism which with so much fury came in with King Charles the Second, and the putting down the playhouse being part of that Reformation, it is evident that the corruption of the nation is so far from proceeding from the playhouse, that it partly proceeds from having no plays at all.
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