t they were glad to hear of its existence even where it brought
them no direct personal gratification.

[Sidenote: 1737--Audacious attempt a black-mailing]

All this had changed in the days of George the Second. There had been
a gradual and marked improvement in the moral tone of the drama,
unaccompanied, it must be owned, by any very decided improvement in the
moral tone of society. Perhaps the main difference between the time of
the Restoration and that of the early Georges is that the vice of the
Restoration was wanton school-boy vice, and that of the early Georges
the vice of mature and practical men. In the Restoration time people
delighted in showing off their viciousness and making a frolic and a
parade of it; at the time of the Georges they took their profligacy in
a quiet, practical, man-of-the-world sort of way, and made no work
about it. One effect of this difference was felt in the greater
decorum, the greater comparative decorum, of the Georgian drama.

Yet this was the time when Walpole thought it necessary to introduce a
measure putting the stage under new {95} and severe restrictions.
Walpole himself cared nothing about literature, and nothing about the
drama; and he was as little squeamish as man could possibly be in the
matter of plain-spoken indecency. What troubled him was not the
indecency of the stage, but its political innuendo. It never occurred
to him to care whether anything said in Drury Lane or Covent Garden
brought a blush to the cheek of any young person; but he was much
concerned when he heard of anything said there which was likely to make
people laugh at a certain elderly person. As we have seen, he had
never got the best of it in the long war of pamphlets and squibs and
epigrams and caricature. It was out of his power to hire penmen who
could stand up against such antagonists as Swift and Bolingbroke and
Pulteney. He was out of humor with the press; had been out of humor
with it for a long time; and now he began to be out of humor with the
stage. Indeed, it should rather be said that he was now falling into a
new fit of ill-humor with the stage; for he had been very angry indeed
with Gay for his "Beggars' Opera," and for the attempt at a
continuation of "The Beggars' Opera" in the yet more audacious "Polly,"
which brought in more money to Gay from its not having been allowed to
get on the stage than its brilliant predecessor had done after all its
unexampled run. The measur